A8 EZ RE THE WASHINGTON POST.TUESDAY, MAY 17 , 2022
buffalo shootingand cousin he was going home to
“wait and pray,” hoping that may-
be his mother had gone to the
hospital.
Then his daughter called, cry-
ing hysterically.
The daughter said, “This girl
just messaged me on Facebook,
and she wanted to know, ‘Is this
Grandma?’”
She texted her father the photo.
“It was my mom, laying on her
back,” Jones said. “I guess they
must’ve took the picture off the
livestream because the barrel of
his gun was still in the picture.
Like he was standing over her.”
Later, he saw the full video of
the livestream, the ghastly shoot-
er’s-view chronicle of the mur-
ders that was being forwarded
around the world.
“It was everywhere,” he said.
“He shot her once. Then he ran
out of bullets, he stepped back,
got another magazine, loaded it
and shot her again.”
Saturday night at about 9:30,
police would arrive at Chaney’s
home to formally inform her fian-
ce that Chaney, 65 and retired
from work at suit manufacturing
and baseball cap companies, had
been killed, Jones said. By then,
the family already knew.
“My kids all seen the video,”
Jones said. “They’re all trauma-
tized by seeing their grandmoth-
er.”
Andre Mackniel, who had gone
into Tops in search of the birthday
cake for his young son, never
made it out. Tracey Maciulewicz,
who wrote on Facebook that she
was Mackniel’s fiance, said that
Saturday was her son’s birthday.
“Today my baby was born but
today my soul mate was taken,”
she wrote. “How do I tell my son
his daddy’s not coming home?
How do I as a mother make it ok?
Someone please tell me because I
really don’t know.” Maciulewicz
did not respond to requests for
comment.
Jahon Smith, Mackniel’s cous-
in, said in an email that Mackn-
iel’s brother had recently died
after a brief illness. “This is a very
hard time for the family,” said
Smith. “I hope justice is served.”
Outside the supermarket, El-
more, the passerby who had fig-
ured right away that the pops
were gunfire, was telling a friend
what had happened when he saw
Gendron — “in full army gear,”
wearing a vest — on the parking
lot pavement, on his knees, “with
the rifle to his throat. And I
thought he was about to kill him-
self.”
“The police came and as soon
as the police came, he took off all
of his army gear, threw the gun
down, and laid down and got
arrested,” Elmore said.
Just up Jefferson Avenue, at
Love’s barber shop, the owner
was outside smoking when he
heard the first shot. He hurried
back inside, figuring this was one
more neighborhood shooting and
would end quickly. But it didn’t.
The shots kept coming, too many
to count, Love said. Finally, when
the firing ceased, Love stepped
outside and recognized the kid
who’d sat on his curb the previous
evening, now dressed in camou-
flage fatigues and body armor,
being loaded into a police vehicle.
Love told his colleague: “He
must have spared me. I had just
offered him a chair the day be-
fore.”
Another of Love’s co-workers,
Phillip Washington, was relieved
to see his cousin emerge from
Tops but was shaken by the sight
of bodies lying in the parking lot.
If that wasn’t traumatic enough,
Washington soon also saw the
pictures online, on Twitch, of the
shooter firing a bullet into a wom-
an’s head, of the N-word inscribed
on the shooter’s weapon.
Washington’s cousin told him
that she had heard the shooter
say, as he emerged from the store:
“I did what I came to do.”
Gendron wrote repeatedly that
he planned to die in the attack.
The shootings, he wrote many
times, would somehow be worse
for him than for his victims be-
cause he would die a horrible
death while they perished quick-
ly. He told himself that his death
would be worthwhile because he
would have fulfilled his “duty” to
his race as a “terrorist” and
“White supremacist” — a set of
beliefs he said he adopted after
“extreme boredom” led him to
spend countless hours, starting
shortly after the pandemic began,
reading far-right message boards
on 4chan and other online fo-
rums.
Police said Monday that the
shooter had planned other at-
tacks, and Gendron detailed sev-
eral of those in his online diary.
Inside the store, after Gendron
was taken into custody, there was
only silence, broken by bursts of
sound from police radios and
officers calling out to survivors in
their hiding places.at Tops — the grocery where his
older brother, Margus D. Morri-
son, 52, did his regular shopping.
When Frederick learned that
Margus had been killed, “I broke
down,” he said.
Margus was a father, a school
bus aide, a fun guy who liked to
joke around. The brothers didn’t
talk much about racism, Freder-
ick said.
“We just know it’s there,” he
said.
Jones waited in the Tops lot
after the shootings with his aunt
and cousin while the store was
evacuated, still hoping to find
Chaney, his mom. Nearby stood
other relatives and friends of
those who went shopping Satur-
day and didn’t come home.
Katherine “Kat” Massey, 72, a
longtime civil rights activist,
planned to be picked up by her
brother when she finished shop-
ping at Tops, according to her
sister, Barbara Massey. As the
afternoon wore on, Barbara stood
in the parking lot, dialing and
redialing anyone who might
know where her sister could be.
No one would have a good an-
swer.
Pearl Young, 77, had gone out to
breakfast Saturday, then over to
Tops to shop. Her son Damon, 48,
planned to fetch her, and the two
had been communicating back
and forth. Then she stopped re-
sponding. Suddenly, Damon’s
phone began buzzing with news
alerts about the chaos at Tops.
“She wasn’t answering, wasn’t
calling back,” he said. “They said
it was some people wounded as
well, so I was kind of hoping for
that.”
At a nearby school, where de-
tectives shared updates with dis-
traught families, Damon learned
that his mother had been shot
and killed. He could think only of
getting out of the building and
letting his sister know what hap-
pened. (A detective would later
tell him the details he felt com-
pelled to know. His mother was
shot in the head, the detective
said. “He did tell me that even
though I think I want to go to the
morgue, he doesn’t recommend
that for me,” Damon said. “I’m
taking his word for that.”)
He texted his sister, who called
him, hysterical. “I got in my car
and did my crying on my way to
my sister’s house,” Damon said.
Back at the Tops lot, Jones
stared at his mother’s empty car.
After an hour with no news, “I
couldn’t really take any more of
it,” Jones said. He told his auntNo. 2, she said, she felt something
ominous. Her boyfriend and their
10-month-old son planned to visit
her later that afternoon, but sud-
denly, she didn’t want them to
come.
When the shooting started, At-
kinson’s closest exit was the main
entrance, but the shooter stood
between her and the doors, so she
dashed down an aisle and ended
up in the conference room with
Bridges and the others.
“We were falling all over each
other,” she said. “The gunshots
sounded like they were getting
closer and closer. We were all
crying.”
Bridges and the others hud-
dled inside the conference room
for what felt like forever, until
they heard knocking at the door.
One of Bridges’s fellow employees
identified himself, and when
Bridges opened up, police officers
were there and directed everyone
out the store’s rear door.
“And that was the end of it,”
Bridges said, except that it was no
such thing.‘My soul mate was taken’
For 10 families, this was the
beginning — of an unbearable
pain, an everlasting emptiness.
Frederick Morrison, 49, was
outside his Buffalo home enjoy-
ing his Saturday when people
started talking about a shootingning. “l looked to see what the hell
was going on,” he said. “I peeked
around the corner. You could hear
bullets hitting” the shelves all
around the front of the store.
A man sprinted past Bridges
and said, “That’s somebody
shooting.” Bridges grabbed the
people closest to him — the store’s
produce manager, the night oper-
ations manager, and five or six
customers — and sprinted with
them to the back. On the way, he
saw bullets riddle the dairy cooler
and meat station.
The shooter was nearby, Bridg-
es knew: “He had to be close to me
because the lady in the pharmacy
got grazed. And when she got
grazed, that means by the time I
was going through the damn dou-
ble doors, he was coming towards
the damn back. You could hear
how close he was because you
could literally hear the sound of
bullets hitting stuff.”
Bridges ushered the others into
a conference room. “I wanted to
make sure those people stayed
safe,” he said, “so I barricaded
that door with the heaviest thing
in there, which was that table,
and locked it.”
Keyshanti Atkinson, a 19-year-
old cashier who started at Tops
three months ago, was working
an extra shift as a favor for a
co-worker, 12:30 to 7 p.m. A few
minutes into her shift at registerthe friend said.
Julie Harwell was at the store
to pick up some hamburgers and
hot dogs for her birthday barbe-
cue; she was turning 33 on Sun-
day. Her partner, Lamont Thom-
as, and 8-year-old daughter, Lon-
din Thomas, had sneaked away
across the store to buy mix for a
birthday cake.
Her daughter selected a straw-
berry cake with vanilla icing.
Then, the percussive, piercing
sounds bounced off the walls of
the grocery store, making it
sound like shots were coming
from everywhere. Products fell off
shelves. Shoppers and store
clerks tripped over themselves
trying to escape.
“Something told me to get up
and run,” Harwell said.
Bridges, the Tops worker, had
clocked in at 10 a.m., as usual. He
had a small pile of price tags in his
hand, and he was marking prod-
ucts when he heard the first four
pops, coming from outside. “I
thought maybe somebody had a
car that was out here popping
fireworks,” said Bridges, 45.
But the next pops came from
inside the store. Must be a rob-
bery, Harwell thought. Gun vio-
lence in this part of East Buffalo is
not unusual, residents said, and
many people came together regu-
larly to push back against the
violence. But gunfire remained all
too common, and now, Harwell
shouted out for her daughter and
partner.
“By the time I called their
names, I heard more shots,” she
said.
She dropped to the floor and
tried to crawl on her stomach to
someplace safe.
At the back of the store, Thom-
as, her 33-year-old partner,
couldn’t see what was going on
but “just heard everything, just
never-ending gunshots,” he said.
He and his daughter “hid in the
back, in the milk freezer” for what
seemed like “forever. Way longer
than it was supposed to.”
Harwell, meanwhile, ran
through the aisles in search of
sanctuary. The gunman was mov-
ing through the store, apparently
searching for people to kill, she
said.
Then, suddenly, there he was,
the shooter, an arm’s length be-
hind her, as she and another
shopper tried to escape. The other
shopper lunged at the gunman,
Harwell said, and he shot her
dead.
That shooting allowed Harwell
a moment to rush to the back of
the store and hide.
“If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t
be alive,” Harwell said. “She
lunged at him, and that’s why
she’s dead. I don’t even know her
name. I want to tell her family
thank you.”
The Tops security guard on
duty when the shooter entered
the store, Aaron Salter Jr., tried to
halt the gunman’s progress, firing
his handgun several times. But
the bullets met the shooter’s bul-
letproof vest and failed to fell
him, according to Buffalo Police
Commissioner Joseph Grama-
glia, who hailed Salter, a retired
Buffalo police officer, as “a hero in
our eyes.”
Sisters Joann Daniels and Ce-
lestine Chaney had left Daniels’s
nearby home to stop into Tops for
ingredients to make a shrimp
dinner and homemade strawber-
ry shortcake.
As Daniels and Chaney headed
into the freezer aisle, the shots
rang out. Chaney fell as they were
running, according to Wayne
Jones, Chaney’s son.
When Daniels reached “the
freezer and turned around, my
mom wasn’t with her,” Jones said.
Bridges, in Aisle 14, heard peo-
ple screaming and saw some run-The barber, who is Black, of-
fered him a chair.
The teen replied: “No, I’m
good,” Love recalled.
Grady Lewis, a 50-year-old
man who collects bottles and cans
in the neighborhood, said the
teen told him about 5 p.m. Friday
that he planned to camp out
somewhere nearby for the night.
The teen stayed on the curb
until past 7 p.m., when Love shut-
tered his shop for the evening,
leaving only his dog, Buzz Buzz,
inside.
The alleged shooter knew
nothing of East Buffalo, but the
place he focused on — the only
supermarket in the neighbor-
hood, the only pharmacy, the
place where many people pay
their utility bills — was a people
magnet, a godsend, some resi-
dents said, recalling their years-
long campaign to persuade a gro-
cery chain to invest in a low-in-
come area where the main shop-
ping drag is dotted with empty
lots and vacant buildings.
As it turned out, Gendron had
been outside that supermarket
before, multiple times, according
to a nearly 600-page online diary
by a writer who identified himself
as Gendron — a meticulously de-
tailed, wildly rambling account of
six months of obsessive planning;
angry, unhinged rants; and an-
guished descriptions of his own
mental disarray. The teen from a
rural town 200 miles away kept
the diary to document his prepa-
rations to drive to the Tops in a
neighborhood he had selected for
its dense population of Black peo-
ple, “enter with Bushmaster XM-
15 and shoot all blacks,” making
sure to “livestream it on Twitch.”
Saturday’s massacre left 13
people shot, 11 of them Black. The
shooter killed 10 people. Police
captured Gendron at the site, and
prosecutors charged him with
first-degree murder. He has
pleaded not guilty.
Before 2:30 p.m. on Saturday,
before the pop-pop-pop-pop-pop
that Bridges first thought must be
fireworks and that all too many
people on the block knew to be
automatic gunfire, the teenager
charged with the shootings wrote
that he had recently been tossed
out of community college for fail-
ing to show up to classes, and
described how he spent his days
assembling his arsenal, plotting
his attack, carefully counting the
calories he consumed, and savor-
ing hundreds of memes and pseu-
doscientific data that bolstered
his belief that Jews, Blacks and
the very rich were to blame for a
decline of the White race that he
concluded would end in “mass
genocide of white people.”
“Attacking in a high-black den-
sity area with high density person
count will have the greatest
chance of success,” Gendron
wrote in December.
He was, he wrote, deeply alone,
largely sleepless, often suicidal,
occasionally aware of his mental
decline. “I am,” he wrote in Febru-
ary, “a radical, extremist, racist,
and after the attack a terrorist.”
In January, he bought an ar-
mored vest. In February, he set-
tled on Tops, having searched
online and found that the 14208
Zip code had a striking concen-
tration of Black residents — 72.
percent, according to the 2020
census.
“Damn that is looking good,” he
wrote on Feb. 17.
On March 8, after noting that
“suicide seems very tempting
right now,” Gendron wrote that
he drove to Buffalo, “went inside
Top’s,” drew a map of the store,
and “I noted there were 45 blacks
inside, 8 white inside, and 10
blacks on the outside of the store.”
As Gendron was leaving the
store, he wrote, a “black armed
security guard came up to me and
said ‘I’ve seen you go in and out ...
What are you doing?’ And I said I
was collecting consensus data, he
said if I talked to the manager
about it and I said no, and then he
said I have to talk to him first.”
“I said bye and thanks and
walked back to my car. In hind-
sight that was a close call,” he
wrote.
‘Somebody got shot’
It was 2:30 p.m. when everyone
heard the pops.
Outside the store, Gregory El-
more was walking up Jefferson
Avenue when a woman he passed
asked, “Who’s shooting off fire-
works?”
“That’s not fireworks, that’s an
automatic rifle,” Elmore said.
“How do you know?”
“Sound,” Elmore replied. “I
know a rifle when I hear one.”
Suddenly, a friend of Elmore’s
who was standing on the corner
called out, “Come here, come
here, come here, call the police.”
“For what?” Elmore said.
“Somebody got shot at Tops,”
SHOOTING FROM A
Inside the grocery store, gunshots seemed ‘never-ending’
LIBBY MARCH FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Jerome Bridges, 45, was working at Tops during the rampage. Fellow employee Rinniey Baker, 57, left
shortly before the attack. The gunman “is not going to ruin my love for my community,” Baker said.MATT BURKHARTT FOR THE WASHINGTON POST
Near the scene of the rampage in Buffalo on Saturday. Thirteen people were shot, and 10 died. In the
Tops parking lot, friends and relatives gathered in hopes of learning their loved ones’ fates.