Once a sanctuary, many Buffalo residents now feel unsafe in area of mass shooting

The Tops Friendly Market chosen by the white gunman to launch his deadly racist attack on Saturday served as an anchor of sorts for the Black community.

The Tops Friendly Market chosen by the white gunman to launch his deadly racist attack on Saturday served as an anchor of sorts for the Black community along Buffalo’s Jefferson Avenue, one of the few places where residents could buy groceries.

Now even that modest sanctuary no longer feels safe to many Black people in Buffalo, which takes pride in its nickname “the City of Good Neighbours.”

Not after 18-year-old Payton Gendron, dressed in camouflage and body armor and wielding a rifle with a high-capacity magazine, drove into the supermarket parking lot in broad daylight and opened fire, killing 10 and wounding three others. Eleven of the 13 victims were Black.

“Somebody knew enough to know the one store our community has,” said Denise Glenn, an activist from VOICE Buffalo, speaking to the clutch of about 100 people who gathered on Sunday morning outside Tops, which had been cordoned off by police tape and adorned with flowers and makeshift memorials.

Glenn was alluding to the chilling news that the gunman had driven for hours from his home to target the store, having selected it because of the neighbourhood’s high concentration of Black residents, according to authorities.

“That was an evil, racist, white supremacist,” Reverend Darius Pridgen said from the pulpit at True Bethel Baptist Church on Sunday. “He literally looked for a zip code that had the highest concentration of African Americans.”

The worshipers at the predominantly Black church, about a five-minute drive from Tops, included family of the victims and some of those who were at the store when the rampage unfolded.

Rev. Pridgen invited members of the congregation who were touched by the shooting to come to the front of the church and share their experiences. One by one, they came forward.