By Jenna Zucker for Reuters
New York authorities on Sunday were investigating how a white 18-year-old, who the governor said had been on the radar of authorities since high school, was able to shoot 10 people to death in a Black neighbourhood grocery store.
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The suspect, Payton Gendron, surrendered to police on Saturday at the Buffalo, New York, store after what authorities called an act of "racially motivated violent extremism." He apparently publicised a racist manifesto on the internet.
"The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake this is an absolute racist hate crime that will be prosecuted as a hate crime," Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told reporters on Sunday.
Eleven people struck by gunfire were Black and two were white, officials said. The racial breakdown of the dead was not made clear.
The Buffalo shooting follows other racially motivated mass murders in recent years, including a Pittsburgh synagogue attack that left 11 dead in October 2018, and the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021 in which a white man killed eight people, targeting Asians.
Authorities said Gendron drove to Buffalo from his home several hours away to launch the afternoon attack, which he broadcast in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com.
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New York Governor Kathy Hochul said the firearm used in the killings was legally purchased but had been illegally modified with a high-capacity magazine.
On Sunday, several dozen community members held an emotional vigil for the victims outside the Tops grocery store. Nearby at True Bethel Baptist Church, a reverend led a solemn service for a large crowd of worshipers, including some family of the victims and some who had been at the store at the time of the shooting.
One was Charles Everhart Sr., 65, whose grandson Zaire Goodman, 20, worked at the store. Goodman was shot in the neck but survived.
"He was pushing the carts back to the store and he was one of the first to get hit," Everhart said.
Racist manifesto
A 180-page manifesto circulating online on Saturday was believed to have been authored by Gendron.
"This manifesto tells everything to us and that is what's so bone-chilling about it," Hochul told CNN on Sunday.
Another document circulating online that appeared to have been written by Gendron sketched out a to-do list for the attack.
A spokesperson for the Erie County district attorney's office declined to comment on the documents.
Hochul told ABC News on Sunday that Gendron had been on authorities' radar "with respect to something he wrote in high school," without elaborating.
The governor said an investigation into the massacre would focus on how Gendron managed to get away with it when he was known to authorities and presented a threat.
"I want to know what people knew and when they knew it," she said.
Hochul told reporters she was dismayed that the suspect managed to live-stream his attack on social media, which she blamed for hosting a "feeding frenzy" of violent extremist ideology.
"These outlets must be more vigilant in monitoring social media content," she said.
Social media and streaming platforms like Twitch, which said it removed the stream after less than two minutes, have grappled with controlling violent and extremist content for years.
"The user has been indefinitely suspended from our service, and we are taking all appropriate action, including monitoring for any accounts rebroadcasting this content," a Twitch spokesperson said.
Gendron, who is from the town of Conklin, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, was arraigned hours after the shooting in state court on first-degree murder charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn.
Gendron entered a plea of not guilty and is scheduled to return to court on 19 May. He was on suicide watch and isolated from other incarcerated individuals on Sunday, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said.
Sharon Doyle, a 55-year-old security guard with Erie County Public Library, led a chant of "Black Lives Matter, my life matters," at the morning vigil.
"We all go in this Tops. I was scared to even go to Walmart last night," Doyle said. "I have to go to work tomorrow and I'm terrified."
Stephen Belongia, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau's Buffalo field office, said the attack would be investigated both as a hate crime and as an act of "racially motivated violent extremism" under federal law.
US President Biden decried the shooting as "abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation" in a statement on Saturday.
- Reuters