US in mourning after ‘racist’ mass shooting

People gather outside of Tops market yesterday in Buffalo. (AFP)

Grieving residents from the US city of Buffalo held vigils yesterday after a white gunman who officials have deemed “pure evil” shot dead 10 people at a grocery store in a racially-motivated rampage. Buffalo, New York police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told reporters the 18-year-old suspect did “reconnaissance” on the predominantly Black area surrounding Tops Friendly Market and drove there from his home town of Conklin, more than 200 miles away. Wearing heavy body armour and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle, the shooter killed 10 people and wounded three others — almost all of them Black — before threatening to turn the gun on himself. Police talked the gunman down before arresting him. The suspect, identified as Payton Gendron, was arraigned late Saturday on a single count of first-degree murder and held without bail, the Erie County district attorney’s office said. He pleaded not guilty. “The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake that this is an absolute racist hate crime” and will be prosecuted as such, Gramaglia said yesterday, adding the shooter also had a rifle and shotgun in his car. Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown was unequivocal about the shooter’s motivations: “This individual came here with the express purpose of taking as many Black lives as he possibly could.” President Joe Biden, speaking in Washington at a service for fallen police officers, condemned the racist extremism and said “we must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America.” He said the gunman, “armed with weapons of war and a hateful soul, shot and killed 10 innocent people in cold blood” in the western New York city. “Hearts are heavy once again,” Biden continued, “but our resolve must never, ever waver.” Earlier yesterday residents gathered outside the store for a vigil, as New York Governor Kathy Hochul and state Attorney General Letitia James addressed a service at the city’s True Bethel Baptist Church. In alternately angry and mournful tones, speakers denounced the latest eruption of racist violence and the ready availability of powerful guns in what has become a sadly familiar scene across America. Hochul, herself a Buffalo native, described the crime as a “military-style execution” — she said the shooter carried an AR-15 — and said racist messaging was “spreading like wildfire” especially online. Hochul called on officials of both political parties to “make sure these people crawl back into their holes and stay there.” The attack evoked memories of some of the worst racist attacks in recent US history, including the 2015 killing by a young white man of nine worshippers in a Black church in South Carolina, and the 2019 attack by a white man in Texas that claimed 23 lives, most of them Latino. Attorney General James, who is Black, described Saturday’s attack as “domestic terrorism, plain and simple.” Later yesterday she gave some details of the victims who included shoppers and store workers, describing an elderly woman who planted trees on her block, and a woman who had gone grocery shopping after visiting her husband at the nursing home. “I held in my arms a young lady who worked at Tops, who was so afraid that she was about to die, who witnessed the bloodshed, who shook and quivered in my arms this morning,” James said. “Who is afraid for her community, afraid also for herself.” The gunman shot four people in the store’s parking lot, three of them fatally, before entering the supermarket.