Buffalo suspect planned attack for months, online posts reveal

A cache of online postings suggests months of preparation and planning preceded Saturday’s racist massacre in Buffalo and shows how the suspect evaded a state law that could have prevented him from owning a gun.

New York’s so-called red-flag law took effect in 2019, allowing judges to bar people believed to be dangerous from possessing firearms. Yet Payton S Gendron, the 18-year-old man accused of killing 10 people at a Tops supermarket Saturday, was able to buy an assault-style weapon despite having been held for a mental health evaluation last year after making a threatening remark at his high school.

He described the remark — he responded to a school project question by writing that he wanted to commit a murder-suicide — as a joke, according to a law enforcement official familiar with the case, and was released.

But the postings that came to light Monday make it evident that Gendron was lying.

“I got out of it because I stuck with the story that I was getting out of class and I just stupidly wrote that down,” Gendron wrote. “That is the reason I believe I am still able to purchase guns. It was not a joke, I wrote that down because that’s what I was planning to do.”

The ruse worked: On Monday, state police confirmed that they did not seek a red-flag order against Gendron, who is now charged with one of the deadliest racist massacres in recent American history.

The newly discovered writings appear to have been posted on Discord, a chat application, by a user named Jimboboiii before being uploaded to internet forums as a pair of comprehensive documents. They feature thousands of lines of racist, antisemitic and often rambling remarks, and include details on how Gendron apparently planned and practiced for his attack and paid for his weapons and other equipment.

Jimboboiii was also the name used in a livestream that Gendron posted Saturday as he began his attack on Tops, snippets of which circulated online on several platforms before being expunged.

The Discord posts include pictures of Gendron and extensive details that align with what is publicly known about him, and in many ways mirror a racist screed that authorities have confirmed he published online just before the attack.

The compendium also appears to show that Gendron fully realised the consequences of his violence. “I am well aware that my actions will effectively ruin my life,” reads one posting from early December. “If I’m not killed during the attack I will go to prison for an inevitable life sentence.”

Since New York’s so-called red-flag law took effect in 2019, judges have issued 589 orders barring people from possessing firearms, according to the state Office of Court Administration. About 18 orders to take guns away from people are issued per month under the law.

The process involves filing an application with the state court system at the county level, stating that a person “is likely to engage in conduct that would result in serious harm to self or others.”

Volunteers distribute food at Buffalo Community Fridge in Buffalo, N Y on Monday, May 16, 2022. According to the supermarket chain in a statement posted on social media, Tops supermarket would "remain closed until further notice," after 10 people were killed by a white gunman in a racist massacre on Saturday. The New York Times

“There’s a real question about whether that law was effectively applied when this person was apparently detained after making threats,” said state Sen Brian Kavanagh, a Democrat who represents parts of lower Manhattan and Brooklyn and who sponsored the bill. “We passed the law specifically to ensure that people who exhibit signs of being dangerous to themselves or others can be denied access to guns.”

Gendron’s newly discovered online posts also cast doubt on the thoroughness of his mental health evaluation. “I had to spend ~20 hours in that ER waiting for somebody to give me 15 minutes to talk to me,” he wrote. “This proved to me that the US healthcare system is a joke.”

But even the few people close to Gendron appeared to have little inkling about what was in store. Matthew Casado, 19, said Monday that he was one of Gendron’s only friends, having known him since they were in second grade together.

The friends had gone target shooting in the past, and Friday, the day before the attack, Casado said Gendron unexpectedly showed up at his house and dropped off five boxes of ammunition. Later, Casado got a text message from Gendron, who said “he needed space to rearrange his house,” Casado said. He added that Gendron said he would return that evening to pick up the bullets. He never did.

A day later, Casado, who is Latino, learned that his friend was accused of committing the racist massacre.

“Until Saturday, I always knew him as a good person. He was never racist towards me, or around me,” Casado said in the backyard of his home in Conklin, New York. “I didn’t know he was racist.”

The Discord postings, first reported by The Washington Post, also suggest that Gendron initially intended to stage his killing March 15 to correspond with the third anniversary of a 2019 attack at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, a massacre that left 51 people dead.

In a separate screed Gendron is believed to have posted in the days before the attack on the supermarket, he expressed admiration for the gunman in that killing and another in El Paso, Texas, in 2019, as well as repeated references to a white supremacist ideology known as replacement theory, which imagines a nefarious scheme to “replace” white Americans — and voters — with immigrants or people of colour.

The theory, once confined to conspiracy websites and publications, has found a larger audience in recent years as prominent conservative commentators and lawmakers have helped spread versions of it.

Alex B Newhouse, the deputy director of the Center on Terrorism, Extremism and Counterterrorism at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies, said Monday that Gendron might belong to the same pattern of extremism as the shooters in El Paso and Christchurch, and that he sought to bring about complete social destruction.

A lot of Gendron’s writing “was more of a means to an end than an end itself,” Newhouse said. “It’s a way to recruit and radicalise people.”

Investigators believe that Gendron traveled halfway across New York, from his home in a small town near Binghamton, to shoot and kill Black people in east Buffalo, an area known for its large Black population — going so far as to visit the neighborhood the day before the attack in what they described as a reconnaissance mission.

On Monday, police and city officials also confirmed that Gendron had traveled to Buffalo in early March — seemingly in preparation for his aborted March 15 plan — and that they believed Gendron had planned a prolonged massacre Saturday.

Gendron surrendered to police after his attack and was charged with first-degree murder, to which he pleaded not guilty. Of the victims of the shooting, several were older shoppers as well as a supermarket security guard. The guard exchanged fire with the suspect, who was protected by body armour and fired a semi-automatic rifle.

President Joe Biden will visit Buffalo on Tuesday to visit with families who lost relatives, including the family of Ruth Whitfield, an 86-year-old grandmother killed while shopping at Tops. On Monday, the Whitfield family expressed grief and outrage, demanding that the nation’s leaders do more to fight white supremacy and the ubiquity of guns often used in such mass shootings.

“We’re tired of losing our loved ones to senseless violence,” said Garnell Whitfield Jr, Ruth Whitfield's son and a former Buffalo fire commissioner, flanked by his siblings as well as Ruth Whitfield’s grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

At a midday news conference, Whitfield was joined by Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown, who also called for gun control measures and improved mental health treatment. He echoed a call made Sunday by Gov Kathy Hochul, a fellow Democrat, for measures to stop hate speech from spreading online.

“The availability of guns in this country needs to change,” Brown said. “People spreading hate through the internet and indoctrinating people in the ways of hate needs to change. The lack of services for people with mental health issues needs to change.”

Another victim of the shooting, 72-year-old Katherine Massey, had seemingly been well aware of the danger, penning a letter last year to The Buffalo News, according to the newspaper, in which she argued for “extensive federal action/legislation to address” gun violence.

Gendron had recently purchased a Bushmaster assault weapon near his home in Conklin, according to Robert Donald, the owner of Vintage Firearms in Endicott, New York, who primarily sells collectible firearms.

In Gendron’s home county, Broome, there have been 11 red-flag orders, or about 1 for every 18,000 residents — roughly average for the state. The court system does not track the number of applications that were denied.

Nineteen states have enacted such laws, including Virginia and New Mexico as recently as 2020. Because almost all have been enacted within the past 10 years, there is limited research on their effectiveness.

The law enforcement official who had been briefed on the call about Gendron last year said that in New York, hundreds of school threats are called in annually — including three Monday in the wake of the massacre — and that in each case, authorities interview students and parents to determine whether students have access to guns. Authorities then try to make a reasoned call on what action to take.

The shooting in Buffalo — New York’s second most-populous city — has shaken many Black residents who say they have endured discrimination and segregation there.

That tension has been intensified by false alarms about other shootings as well as Monday’s arrest of a local man, Joseph S Chowaniec, 52, who was charged by the Erie County district attorney, John J Flynn, with making threatening calls to two local businesses Sunday in which he referenced the shooting at Tops.

At a news conference Monday afternoon, Flynn pleaded for patience from the public, noting that Gendron is innocent until proven guilty. Still, even some elected officials seemed frustrated by prospect that justice might be delayed too long.

“This young man was walking around with a camera on his head: He showed the whole world what he was doing,” said Assemblywoman Crystal Peoples-Stokes, a Buffalo Democrat who serves as state Assembly majority leader and is Black. “And I understand that they got to go through a court. I get that. But a lot of the anger that people have inside is from the fact that their loved ones have been murdered for going to the supermarket.”

Such sentiments were also expressed by Whitfield, whose family is being represented by civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump. Crump said he and a legal team were considering lawsuits against a wide variety of people and institutions — including cable news stations and politicians — he called “the root of the hate.”

“Even though they may not have pulled the trigger,” Crump said, “They loaded the gun.”

Whitfield was emotional in speaking of his mother, Ruth, whom he described as a loving force — “My mom was my heart,” he said — whose death had “forever changed, forever damaged” his family.

At the same time, he said he planned to fight for changes to laws to make such massacres more difficult.

“We’re going to cry, and we’re going to grieve,” he said. “But that’s not all we’re going to do.”

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