The gun shop owner who sold the Bushmaster XM-15 to the 18-year-old who shot and killed 10 people at a Tops supermarket in Buffalo, N.Y., said his customer had passed a background check and raised no red flags.
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“I just can’t believe it. I don’t understand why an 18-year-old would even do this,” Robert Donald, owner of Vintage Firearms in Endicott, N.Y., told The New York Times on Sunday. “I know I didn’t do anything wrong, but I feel terrible about it.”
The 75-year-old has owned the shop nearly 30 years, selling mostly collectible firearms. He told The New York Times that he was shocked to hear from federal authorities and then received a visit from two Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives agents about the murderous rampage by Payton S. Gendron in a Tops supermarket on Saturday.
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“I knew nothing about it until I got the call from them,” he told the newspaper. “I couldn’t believe it.”
The agents took paperwork documenting the purchase, The Times said. Donald said he only sells about a half dozen assault weapons annually, and even so, Gendron did not make an impression.
“He didn’t stand out — because if he did, I would’ve never sold him the gun,” Donald told The Times.
Gendron later modified the used semiautomatic rifle illegally so it could accommodate a high-capacity magazine, The Washington Post reported.
The white teen was blatant about the racist nature of his crime, posting a manifesto and then streaming the shooting on the social media site Twitch before it was taken down.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said at a press conference. “It was straight-up racially motivated.”
Arrested at the scene, Gendron was later arraigned and is being held without bail.