2022 Buffalo shooting

• 1. Introduction

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  The 2022 Buffalo shooting took ten lives at a grocery store on the 14th of May 2022. The store was a Tops Friendly Markets in the East Side neighborhood of Buffalo, New York. Three more people were wounded.

  This documentary follows several questions. Who were the people lost that day, and how did others inside the store find ways to survive? What path brought a young man from another part of New York State to this one supermarket? Why did a video of the attack travel so far, so quickly? And what did courts, lawmakers and neighbors do in the months and years afterward?

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• 2. Six Minutes on Jefferson Avenue

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  At around 2:30 p.m. Eastern Daylight Time, the gunman arrived at the Tops supermarket on Jefferson Avenue, in a predominantly Black neighborhood. He carried a rifle and wore body armor and a military helmet. Two more guns waited in his car, a hunting rifle and a shotgun.

  He began in the parking lot, where he shot four people. Three of them died. He then walked inside and shot eight more, killing six.

  Buffalo police received a call at 2:31 p.m. reporting shots fired at the store. The first officers and firefighters arrived a minute later and saw bodies lying outside the building. By 2:34 p.m., a dispatcher was telling responding officers that an active shooter was inside.

  Inside, employees and customers improvised ways to stay alive. Many crowded into the break room and barricaded the door with a heavy desk. Employees hid other customers in the milk cooler. Those customers said the gunman fired through the coolers, but the cartons of milk stopped the bullets.

  An armed security guard, Aaron Salter Jr., a former Buffalo police officer, fired at the gunman. The body armor meant his shot did not stop the attacker. The gunman fired back, and Salter died at the scene.

  According to a law enforcement source, the gunman yelled racial slurs during the attack. Early on, he aimed his rifle at the store manager, who was white, injured and hiding behind a checkout counter. He apologized and did not shoot.

  By 2:36 p.m., he had reached the front of the building. Patrol officers talked him into dropping his gun after he reportedly aimed it at his own neck. A total of 60 shots had been fired.

  Ten of the thirteen people who were shot had died, and Aaron Salter Jr. was among them.

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• 3. The Ten Who Died

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  Ruth Whitfield, 86, was the oldest of the ten people who died. Pearl Young was 77 and Katherine Massey was 72. Heyward Patterson was 67, Celestine Chaney was 65 and Geraldine Talley was 62. Andre Mackneil was 53, Margus D. Morrison was 52, and Roberta A. Drury, at 32, was the youngest.

  Thirteen people were shot in all. Eleven were Black and two were white. Every one of the ten who died was Black.

  Four of the victims worked at the store. Salter was one of them. The other three employees survived.

  Salter, 55, was a former Buffalo Police lieutenant who was working as a security guard. He had attended Canisius University, and the school awarded him a bachelor's degree after his death, during its 2022 graduation ceremony.

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• 4. The Road to Buffalo

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  The drive from Conklin, New York, to Jefferson Avenue covers about 200 miles and takes three and a half hours. Payton Spencer Gendron, born on the 20th of June 2003, made that trip as an 18-year-old college student. Police said he had been in Buffalo in early March and again the day before the shooting, scouting the supermarket. They also said he had researched earlier hate-motivated attacks.

  A warning had surfaced in June 2021. Police in Broome County investigated a threatening statement he made at his high school. Gendron told them he was joking, though he later wrote online that it was a bluff. He was not charged, because investigators found the threat was not specific enough.

  The New York State Police did not ask a court for an order to remove guns from his possession. He underwent a mental health evaluation, but it was not an involuntary commitment. Under federal law, only an involuntary commitment would have barred him from buying guns.

  The COVID-19 pandemic supplied the isolation. Through the message board 4chan, he learned about numerous white supremacist mass murderers. His main inspiration was Brenton Tarrant, who carried out the Christchurch mosque shootings and also livestreamed his attack. After reading Tarrant's manifesto, Gendron came to believe it was his role in life to commit a similar attack and prevent an "uprising" against white people.

  The rifle was a Bushmaster XM-15, an AR-15-style weapon. The seller said Gendron passed the background check and that he did not remember him. New York prohibits magazines holding more than ten rounds, so Gendron traveled to Pennsylvania to buy a 30-round magazine. He also wrote that he had illegally modified the rifle to accept such magazines.

  Before the attack, he wrote a 180-page manifesto and released it online. It centers on mass immigration and promotes the Great Replacement conspiracy theory of Renaud Camus. That theory claims that elites are encouraging immigration and lowering white birth rates in order to subject white people to genocide. Gendron described himself as holding white supremacist, anti-Semitic, populist and ecofascist views. He also voiced support for Dylann Roof and Anders Behring Breivik, as well as Tarrant.

  On the day itself, he brought a camera meant to broadcast what he did.

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• 5. The Livestream

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  A Twitch spokesperson said the livestream came down less than two minutes after the violence started. It was unclear whether the gunman was still firing when it ended. The recording camera was attached to his helmet, and it carried part of the attack live.

  Twitch confirmed that its service had been used. The company said the account behind the stream had been indefinitely suspended. It added that any attempt to re-stream the footage would be monitored and prohibited.

  By then, the video had already escaped. At least one person recorded the stream and posted it to the site Streamable. By the 15th of May, that copy had passed 3 million views.

  The spread of the video to other sites set off debates about the liability of social media companies. People argued over how platforms should respond to similar material, and what the limits of free speech on those sites should be. The footage was also reportedly included on a violence-glorifying website created by the suspect in the Colorado Springs nightclub shooting.

  The question of where the shooter had been radicalized reached a courtroom later. On the 19th of March 2024, a New York state judge ruled that Reddit and YouTube must face lawsuits over accusations that they played a role in his radicalization.

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• 6. Investigation and Justice

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  Erie County Sheriff John Garcia called the shooting a "straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community". Stephen Belongia, head of the local FBI office, said the agency was investigating it as both a hate crime and racially motivated violent extremism. Federal agents interviewed the gunman's parents.

  The Buffalo police commissioner said investigators had found that the gunman planned to continue his attack if he escaped the supermarket. The county's district attorney said he had evidence of racial animosity. Law enforcement sources told The Buffalo News that investigators were examining his contact with a number of people online, including a retired federal agent. They wanted to know whether any of them had thirty minutes of advance notice and failed to alert authorities.

  A separate inquiry opened on the 15th of May into a 911 operator. An assistant manager at the store had reportedly called 911 and whispered, to avoid being heard by the gunman. The dispatcher reportedly shouted at her, wondered aloud why she was whispering, and allegedly hung up. The Office of the Erie County Executive placed the dispatcher on administrative leave, and she was fired after a disciplinary hearing.

  The gunman was arraigned in Buffalo City Court and represented by a public defender. He pleaded not guilty to multiple counts of first-degree murder and was held without bail under suicide watch. The same day, Attorney General Merrick Garland confirmed that the Department of Justice was investigating the shooting as a hate crime.

  On the 1st of June, a grand jury issued a 25-count indictment. It included one count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate, ten counts of first-degree murder as a hate crime, ten counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, and three counts of attempted second-degree murder as a hate crime. It also included one count of second-degree criminal possession of a weapon. On the 2nd of June 2022, he pleaded not guilty to all 25 counts in Erie County Court.

  On the 28th of November 2022, he pleaded guilty to fifteen state counts, including ten counts of first-degree murder and domestic terrorism motivated by hate. The plea was an attempt to avoid the death penalty. On the 15th of February 2023, a judge denied him youthful offender status and sentenced him to 11 life sentences without the possibility of parole, plus 90 years.

  Federal charges remained. In December 2022, his lawyer indicated he would plead guilty to them to avoid a death sentence. On the 12th of January 2024, the Department of Justice announced it would seek the death penalty, the first such case under Garland, who had previously expressed opposition to capital punishment. Prosecutors cited his choice of the supermarket as evidence he planned to "maximize the number of Black victims", along with his white supremacist beliefs and the extensive planning behind the crime. A federal trial was set to begin on the 17th of August 2026.

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• 7. Washington and Albany

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  President Joe Biden called the shooting a racially motivated hate crime and an act of domestic terrorism. He described white supremacy as a "poison... running through our body politic".

  The proposed Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would have created domestic terrorism offices in the Department of Justice and the FBI, focused on neo-Nazis and white supremacy. It passed the House on the 18th of May and failed in the Senate on the 26th of May. Republicans argued it duplicated existing efforts and risked unfairly targeting people as political extremists. Democrats pointed to deep polarization in Congress and said Republicans had refused to compromise on practical steps against gun deaths.

  On the 7th of June 2022, the Senate Judiciary Committee held a hearing titled "the 'Metastasizing' Domestic Terrorism Threat After the Buffalo Attack." Garnell Whitfield Jr., a former Buffalo fire commissioner and the son of Ruth Whitfield, testified. He asked the senators "to imagine the faces of your mothers as you look at the face of my mother, Mrs. Ruth Whitfield... and ask yourself... is there nothing we can do? Is there nothing that you personally are willing to do to stop the cancer of white supremacy and the domestic terrorism it inspires?"

  The Great Replacement theory brought scrutiny to Republican political and media figures who had echoed it, most prominently Fox News commentator Tucker Carlson. Dan McLaughlin of National Review objected, noting that the manifesto never mentioned Carlson and expressed hatred for Fox News. Carlson said the document was "not recognizably left-wing or right-wing; it's not really political at all. The document is crazy." Kate Maltby, writing for The Jewish Chronicle, pointed to similar wording in the manifesto and in one of his broadcasts. Attention also fell on House Republican Conference chair Elise Stefanik, over her statements about immigration and elections.

  New York Governor Kathy Hochul traveled to Buffalo. She said the high-capacity magazine had made the attack so lethal, a magazine that "would have had to have been purchased elsewhere, that's not legal in the state of New York." Ten days after Buffalo, a shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, added to the pressure. The New York State Legislature then passed laws banning most semi-automatic rifle sales to people under 21 and banning certain types of body armor.

  Benjamin Crump, attorney for one victim's family, urged policy changes aimed at the internet sites that radicalize young people. Meanwhile, the New York State Education Department cancelled the U.S. Government and History Regents Exam. It said one question might upset students after the shooting, but did not say what the question was.

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• 8. Remembering and Rebuilding

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  Dozens of residents held a vigil at the supermarket the day after the shooting. True Bethel Baptist Church held a mourning service nearby, attended by victims' families and some survivors.

  Sports teams across the region paused for the victims. Before game one of the National Lacrosse League eastern semifinals, the Buffalo Bandits and Toronto Rock observed a moment of silence, and the 50/50 raffle proceeds went to the families. Bandits head coach John Tavares said his players competed "definitely with a heavy heart". At Sahlen Field, a charity softball game featuring Buffalo Bills players opened with silence. The Buffalo Bisons added a black decal with the date to their batting helmets for the rest of the season, and the Toronto Blue Jays held a moment of silence on the 16th of May.

  Solidarity came across the border as well. Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau condemned the attack. Jim Diodati, mayor of Niagara Falls, Ontario, called Buffalo mayor Byron Brown, and flags in Niagara Falls were lowered to half-mast.

  The store itself had been the only supermarket in the East Side since it opened in 2003. Its closure slowed food access, and organizations inside and outside the community began distributing and delivering food and clothing. Tops offered a free shuttle to another location and pledged daily refrigerated food trucks. The company said it would reopen the store on the 15th of July, with a memorial honoring the victims.

  The Buffalo & Erie County Public Library is building a record of the shooting that includes oral history recordings and preserved mementos. A coalition of institutions supports the work, including The Buffalo History Museum, Buffalo State University and Canisius University. Victims' family members, survivors and community members are part of it too. The coalition's stated mission is "to create a historical record that will demonstrate to current and future generations a true account of the tragedy that took the lives of ten innocent people, wounded three others, and forever changed the history of our city".

  On the 14th of May 2024, two years after the shooting, Tops dedicated the "5/14 Honor Space" at the corner of the Jefferson Avenue lot. It features a sculpture called "Unity" by Buffalo artist Valeria Cray and her son Hiram, along with 10 granite bollards honoring the victims. That same day, the design for a larger memorial called "Seeing Us" was unveiled. Created by Jin Young Song and Douglass Alligood, it will have interconnected arches with an inscription about one victim on each pillar. It will also include an indoor gathering space and an elevated "Memorial Walk" on its roof. Its site has not yet been chosen.

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