Police: Suspect had plans to continue attack

CNN  — 

The man accused of killing 10 people in a racist mass shooting Saturday at a Buffalo, New York, supermarket had plans to continue his shooting rampage and kill more Black people, authorities said Monday.

“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 revelations align with a 180-page racist diatribe authorities have attributed to the suspect, an 18-year-old White man who traveled nearly 200 miles to a supermarket that served as the hub of a predominantly Black neighborhood to unleash an attack. The massacre follows other mass shootings in recent years across the United States in which authorities say the suspect was motivated by hate.

In Buffalo, 10 people were killed and three wounded, with one still hospitalized Monday morning. Eleven victims were Black, officials said, and the attack is being investigated as a hate crime. Those slain range in age from 20 to 86, police said, among them the former police officer who tried to stop the gunman and a number of people doing their regular weekend grocery shopping.

“That could have been our mothers, our grandmothers, our aunts, our uncles,” Kelly Galloway, whose family shops at the grocery on Saturday mornings, told CNN affiliate Spectrum News NY1. “And it was us. It was us.”

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 suspect, Payton S. Gendron, pleaded not guilty Saturday night to a charge of first-degree murder, Buffalo City Court Chief Judge Craig Hannah told CNN, and the district attorney has said he expects to file more charges. Gendron is in custody without bail and under suicide watch, Garcia said. If convicted, he faces a maximum of life in prison without parole.

Wearing protective gear and armed with an assault rifle, the gunman killed several people in the parking lot of the Tops Friendly Markets store before entering the building. He exchanged gunfire with an armed security guard – who was killed – and shot more people inside, then exited and surrendered to police.

Investigators believe the suspect acted alone and had scouted out the store a day earlier, Gramaglia said. The suspect also livestreamed the assault on Twitch as it occurred. The company took down the video within minutes, it said, but social media sites have struggled to stop its spread.

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.”

Since the shooting, officials have looked at what they say was the suspect’s racist intent and his history.

“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 180-page document attributed to Gendron and posted online before the shooting lays out the alleged shooter’s motives and shows the meticulous planning that went into the massacre. CNN independently obtained the document shortly after the mass shooting – before authorities released the name of the suspect – and law enforcement sources have told CNN its description of guns matches the weapons the suspect used.

In it, the suspect allegedly detailed how he had been radicalized by reading the online message board 4chan and described himself as a White supremacist, fascist and anti-Semite. He subscribed to a “great replacement” theory, or the false belief that White Americans are being “replaced” by people of other races. Once a fringe idea, replacement theory has recently become a talking point for Fox News’ host Tucker Carlson as well as other prominent conservatives.

The suspect also wrote he was inspired by the 2019 mass killing at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in which the gunman similarly wrote a lengthy document and livestreamed the attack.

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.

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.

It was not the sort of involuntary commitment that would have precluded the suspect from purchasing a weapon, state police spokesperson Beau Duffy said.

Saturday’s attack stunned those who live in the heart of the Kingsley and Masten Park neighborhoods.

Geraldine Talley, 62, was doing her regular grocery, shopping with her fiancé Saturday, when she was shot and killed, her niece Lakesha Chapman told CNN.

“She’s sweet, sweet, you know, the life of the party,” Chapman said. “She was the person who always put our family reunion together, she was an avid baker … mother of two beautiful children.”

“We’re outraged,” she added. “This is not, obviously, the first racially triggered attack in America. However, it is the first that hits our home.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul announced $2.8 million for the victims and their families, her office said in a statement.

With the grocery closed because of the investigation, Tops Markets is working with a representative of the Masten District to secure free food, supplies and transportation for those in need it, it said. The supermarket is in a so-called “food desert,” or a location where access to fresh foods and groceries is limited, officials said.

The mayor called the site “near and dear” to his heart.

“It’s one that I patronize from time to time,” Brown said Saturday, “my family patronizes from time to time, and some of the victims of this shooter’s attack are people that all of us standing up here know.”

Brown and Hochul urged Tops Supermarket CEO to reopen the store as quickly as possible.

“The Tops Supermarket on Jefferson Avenue is a center for this community,” Brown told CNN on Monday. “The community is loyal to the market. It is a center of community. People come here to shop. People come here for information. They come here to connect with each other.”

CEO John Parsons committed to doing so and “indicated that they will be providing other services to residents in the community to transport them to other Tops markets in their network, to help them get their prescriptions filled,” he said.