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Dezzelynn Brown was standing behind a strand of police tape on Riley Street in Buffalo, gazing at an orange cone in a supermarket parking lot that marked the spot where her daughter Roberta became the first victim in America’s latest racially motivated mass shooting. Brown occasionally consulted the screen on her phone, which showed a woman — captured by the shooter’s camera — at the moment of impact.
“That’s my daughter. There’s smoke coming out of her head,” Brown said, dazed.
At a fire station a block away, Buffalo’s mayor, police commissioner and other officials were attempting on Monday evening to process what had transpired on Saturday afternoon, when 18-year-old Payton Gendron allegedly set upon the Tops Friendly Market in the predominantly African-American East Side neighbourhood and shot 13 people, killing 10 — eight of them black.
Gendron had driven from his parents’ home, 200 miles away, and was dressed in body armour and carrying an assault rifle with a racial epithet painted on its barrel, according to officials. They said he had plans for worse carnage but was cornered by police and surrendered.
A rambling online manifesto allegedly authored by Gendron cited, among other motivations, the “great replacement” — a white supremacist conspiracy theory that non-whites are being ushered into America to overwhelm white voters and seize political power.
“I blame the shooter. I blame racism. I blame hatred,” Byron Brown, the city’s mayor, told reporters. He then reflected on America’s overabundance of guns, concluding: “I don’t know if anyone is safe.”
Buffalo now finds itself among the ranks of Charleston, El Paso, Pittsburgh and other recent scenes of extremist, right-wing mass murder. Saturday’s shooting comes nearly two years after the police killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis exploded the nation’s status quo on race relations, prompting both reckonings and counter-reactions. It will give fresh impetus to those forces, as well as parallel debates about gun control, hate crime legislation, social media and more.
President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visited the community on Tuesday, meeting families of the victims, first responders and local officials and laying flowers at a makeshift memorial. They found a neighbourhood still in shock, grieving friends and neighbours, and people reaching more for the spiritual than the political as they try to make sense of the events.
“This is a nice neighbourhood. Nobody bothers anybody,” said Charbel Mansour, who used to deliver for Amazon in the area and sometimes took breaks in the supermarket parking lot. He kept shaking his head in disbelief that someone could drive such a distance to murder innocents.
“I’ve never seen such evil in my life,” a woman consoling Dezzelynn Brown declared. “It’s like the devil came to town.”
In Conklin, Gendron’s hometown, residents seemed equally mystified. The town of 5,000 is set amid rolling hills alongside the Susquehanna river, near the Pennsylvania border. It is semi-rural but not obviously deprived. As Buffalo’s East Side is defined by Jefferson Avenue, Conklin runs along a two-lane highway.
The Gendrons’ two-storey home is perched in a cul-de-sac above the town. It features a porch swing, a “Welcome” flag and a sweeping green lawn. The only sound on a recent afternoon was birdsong. Residents almost uniformly described the family as “nice” or “very, very nice”.
“He was a great kid. I never had any problem with him,” said the manager of the Reliable Market grocer, where Gendron worked for three months this year. Outside, a handwritten sign read: “Prayers for the people of Buffalo. Prayers for the people of Conklin. UNITED in our Sorrow.” At the nearby regional high school, from which Gendron recently graduated, the flag flew at half-mast.
Cheri Panko, who walks her dogs in Conklin, described the town — which is 90 per cent white, according to the most recent census — as a peaceful enclave that felt removed from the tumult of America’s polarised politics and culture wars.
“We weren’t really swept up in it,” she said, as her dogs played. “A friend of mine called me. They knew the parents and just couldn’t believe this would happen. They’re nice people.”
To experts such as Peter Simi, a professor at Chapman University in California, who studies right-wing extremists, Gendron’s case fits into a recognisable and longstanding pattern: It is one of seemingly lone wolf assailants who have been radicalised and provoked by a wider white supremacist network. Those networks once gathered in person but have long since gone underground and online.
“Each one is a piece of the puzzle in terms of the strategy,” Simi said. “It’s a network of violence that each time it occurs encourages more to follow.”
While police were still scouring social media and collecting evidence, there were signs that Gendron had been inspired by previous white supremacist mass murderers. Elements of his manifesto closely resembled those of Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019. Like Tarrant, Gendron also wore a camera to live-stream his attack.
He was hospitalised for a mental evaluation last year after threatening to commit violence at his school, according to police.
More details are likely to emerge as the investigation proceeds. In the meantime, people in Buffalo — and Conklin — will be grieving and searching for explanations.
Tina Jones, 62, has lived in Buffalo’s East Side for almost 30 years and worked at a bar around the corner from Tops before she retired. She was walking to the store with her two granddaughters on Saturday afternoon but decided to first go to the laundromat. “God kept me going straight,” she said.
Two of her friends perished: Ruth Whitfield, 86, the mother of the city’s former fire commissioner, and Deacon Heyward Patterson, 67, who Jones knew from church. He would give people rides home from the supermarket if they could not afford a taxi, she recalled. “He was a good guy.”
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