Mass shooting in Buffalo, N.Y., that killed 10 a racially motivated hate crime, authorities say

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A white 18-year-old wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera opened fire with a rifle at a supermarket in Buffalo, killing 10 people and wounding three others Saturday in what authorities described as "racially motivated violent extremism."

Police said he shot 11 Black and two white victims before surrendering to authorities in a rampage he broadcast live on the streaming platform Twitch.

Later, he appeared before a judge in a paper medical gown and was arraigned on a murder charge.

"It is my sincere hope that this individual, this white supremacist who just perpetrated a hate crime on an innocent community, will spend the rest of his days behind bars. And heaven help him in the next world as well," said Gov. Kathy Hochul, speaking near the scene of the attack.

The massacre sent shockwaves through an unsettled nation gripped with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes. In the day prior to the shooting, Dallas police said they were investigating a series of shootings in Koreatown as hate crimes. The Buffalo attack came just one month after another mass shooting on a Brooklyn subway train wounded 10 people.

The suspected gunman in Saturday's attack on Tops Friendly Market was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, N.Y., about 320 kilometres southeast of Buffalo.

It wasn't immediately clear why Gendron had travelled to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. A clip apparently from his Twitch feed, posted on social media, showed Gendron arriving at the supermarket in his car.

The gunman shot four people outside the store, three fatally, said Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia. Inside the store, a security guard who was a retired Buffalo police officer fired multiple shots, but a bullet that hit the gunman's bulletproof vest had no effect, Gramaglia added.

The gunman then killed the guard, the commissioner said, then stalked through the store shooting other victims.

"This is the worst nightmare that any community can face, and we are hurting and we are seething right now," Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown said at the news conference. "The depth of pain that families are feeling and that all of us are feeling right now cannot even be explained."

Police entered the store and confronted the gunman in the vestibule.

"At that point the suspect put the gun to his own neck," Gramaglia said. Two officers talked him into dropping the gun, the commissioner said.

Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron's transmission "less than two minutes after the violence started."