Police: Suspect had plans to continue attack
“There was evidence that was uncovered that he had plans, had he gotten out of here, to continue his rampage and continue shooting people,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told CNN. “He’d even spoken about possibly going to another store.”
It “appears” the suspect planned to kill more Black people, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn said, adding, “we need to drill down further.”
There is “some documentation” the suspect had plans possibly for a shooting at “another large superstore,” Gramaglia said. “He was going to get in his car and continue to drive down Jefferson Avenue and continue doing the same thing.”
The shooting was a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said. “This was pure evil.”
The attack began at about 2:30 p.m., when the gunman, wearing heavy tactical gear and armed with an assault rifle, killed several people in the parking lot of the Tops Friendly Markets store. He entered the building and exchanged gunfire with an armed security guard, who was killed, and then shot more people inside. He finally exited the building and surrendered to police.
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown on Monday praised the guard’s heroism, as well as the quick police response.
“Many more people would probably have been killed and injured if the Buffalo Police did not get to the scene as quickly,” Brown said. “They were able to subdue the gunman, they were able to take him into custody without incident and protect the surrounding neighborhood.”
Suspect allegedly wrote 180 pages outlining beliefs
“We continue to investigate this case as a hate crime, a federal hate crime, and as a crime perpetrated by a racially motivated, violent extremist,” Stephen Belongia, special agent in charge of the FBI Buffalo field office, said Sunday at a news conference.
The Buffalo suspect wrote he began seriously planning the attack in January. The document’s author also writes that he targeted this Buffalo neighborhood because it’s in a ZIP code that “has the highest Black percentage that is close enough to where I live.”
Indeed, the ZIP code that includes the store, 14208, is 78% Black, the highest percentage of Black population of any ZIP code in upstate New York, according to the US Census Bureau’s 2020 American Community Survey. The shooting suspect is from the town of Conklin, New York, a three-and-a-half-hour drive from Buffalo near the Pennsylvania border.
The document also states the suspect bought the main gun he used, a Bushmaster XM-15, from a gun store before “illegally modifying it.”
“We are obviously going through (the document) with a fine-toothed comb and reviewing that for all evidence,” prosecutor Flynn told CNN.
Suspect made ‘ominous’ threat last year
A year ago, the suspect landed on the radar of police as a student at Susquehanna Valley High School, officials said.
He made an “ominous” reference to murder-suicide through a virtual learning platform in June, the Susquehanna Valley Central School District said Monday. Though the threat was not specific and did not involve other students, the instructor immediately informed an administrator who escalated the matter to New York State Police, a spokesperson told CNN, adding the law limits what more school officials can say.
Concern arose after the suspect turned in a high school project about murder-suicides, leading to a state police investigation, said Garcia, the sheriff.
“The state police arrived at his house at that point last year,” he said. “He stayed at a facility — I’m not sure if it was a hospital or a mental health facility — for a day and a half.”
State police investigated an unnamed 17-year-old student who had made “a threatening statement” in June at the high school, they confirmed. The student was taken into custody and to a hospital for a mental health evaluation.
CNN’s Dakin Andone, Samantha Beech, Haley Burton, Chuck Johnston, Sarah Jorgensen, Artemis Moshtaghian, Shimon Prokupecz, Liam Reilly, Polo Sandoval, Brian Todd, Casey Tolan, Emma Tucker, Amir Vera, and Holly Yan contributed to this report.
