The buffalo shooter's descent into the underworld of supremacism

On the porch of the Gendron house, in Conklin, a town of 5,000 inhabitants in southern New York State, there was this Thursday a round weight on which little Payton left his handprint before the cement dried. .

Someone stamped the boy's first name in block letters, drew a heart, and marked a date: 2008. Payton S. Gendron was then only four years old.

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Last Saturday, at about 2:30 p.m., that same hand was in a supermarket in Buffalo, 330 kilometers from home, pulling the trigger of an AR-15-style assault rifle, whose charger had been altered to carry more ammunition. the one that comes from the factory and the one allowed by the State of New York.

The boy, turned into an 18-year-old white supremacist intoxicated by conspiracy theories that infest the darkest corners of social networks like 4chan or Reddit, was looking to kill as many black people as possible.

He arrived at the Tops Friendy Market parking lot inspired by the theory of the Great Replacement, which, imported from France and sanctioned by members of the Republican Party on Capitol Hill and popularized in the United States, among others, by Fox News presenter Tucker Carlson, defends that White power and representation is in jeopardy due to a master plan by leftist elites, who are replacing them with minorities that are easier to manipulate.

Before the police arrested him, the young man murdered 10 people, all African Americans, and injured three others, workers and customers of that popular supermarket in the eastern part of Buffalo.

Adorned with supremacist symbols and equipped with military clothing, helmet and bulletproof vest included, the shooter had driven his car to Buffalo the day before for just over three hours.

First, by the typical American highway, with its homogeneous service areas on both sides.

Then up a two-lane state highway through quaint towns with wooden farms and spruce up homes.

A cement scale with Payton Gendron's handprint on it, on the porch of the family home in Conklin.Michael Hill (AP)

The house he shared in Conklin with his parents and two brothers is the spitting image of the suburb's canonical promise, with neatly mowed lawns and a basketball hoop in the driveway.

This Thursday, at the time when the yellow school buses return the children from school, the street was deserted.

The sun was finally shining after a bleak morning of fog and rain, but the porch lights were on.

No one answered the bell.

Earlier, a lady had politely refused to give any information about the family.

"I value her privacy," she said.

Nearby, a teenager about the same age as the shooter described his neighbor as "escaping" before disappearing behind a garage door.

From the depths of the American way of life, five figures, 14208, guided Gendron last Saturday to his goal.

During the preparation of the attack, the young man crossed all the numbers of the postal districts of the State with the demographic data of each area until he found the area with the highest percentage of African-American population.

So he ended up in the eastern part of one of the most segregated cities in the United States.

Although, in reality, his journey had begun much earlier.

During the first coronavirus lockdown, in the spring of 2020, a bored Gendron began to slip into the depths of the internet, from one chat about guns to another about political extremism, until he ended up in forums dedicated to spreading racist and anti-Semitic ideas that warned about the extinction of the white race.

In June of the following year, when he was finishing his studies at the institute in Conklin, a town with a 90% white population, the students were asked to tell what they planned to do after graduating.

The boy, then 17 years old, replied that he was planning a "murder-suicide" ritual, a classic of violence in this country: kill one or more people and then take his own life.

They called the police, he said it was all a joke and they put him under psychiatric observation.

Two weeks later, he graduated and disappeared from the radar of the police, which, according to state law, had to put those facts on his record, which would have prevented him from buying a gun.

The Susquehanna Valley Institute, where the boy studied, wore two banners made by students on Thursday that say: "All with Buffalo."

No one detected the alarm

What happened between that alarm signal and the tragedy in the Tops Market is the story of a descent into hell that parents, teachers and authorities did not know how to see.

Now, all the pieces fall into place thanks to the chilling log of that trip: a 180-page manifesto that Gendron published privately, first on a social network called Discord and then on 4chan.

The text, prolific in racist theories and in disquisitions on the pros and cons of different models of weapons, details that in January of this year Gendron acquired a real arsenal in an armory located 20 kilometers from his home, in a town called Endicott.

His owner has declared this week that he did not remember the boy,

to whom he sold material for military use “because he was of legal age” and because nothing made him suspect that he was going to use it for violent purposes.

The store registers do keep memory of the transaction.

Gendron's manifesto is, in substance and in form, an imitation of the one written by another white supremacist, the 28-year-old Australian Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 Muslims in two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, on a Friday in 2019. at prayer time.

Tarrant, who was sentenced to life in prison, broadcast 17 minutes of extreme violence on the internet.

The Buffalo emulator did the same on Saturday through Twitch, a live video platform owned by Amazon, popular among video game lovers.

When she managed to remove the footage, it was already too late, and it was circulating freely on the internet.

The shooter chose the Tops on Jefferson Street precisely because it was a secular meeting place for a congregation of grocery store goers, mostly older folks.

Among the material that we now know, there are hand-drawn plans of the store, which he had visited in March and last Friday at 4:00 p.m., the day and time that he considered optimal for the success of his plans.

It is not clear why he did not carry out the attack then.

Investigators have concluded that he slept inside his car that night, in a parking lot in the nearby town of Cheektowaga.

“He looked like he wanted to be shot”

It is also not known why he dropped other targets, such as a barbershop in Buffalo, a Walmart in Rochester or a shopping mall in Syracuse.

What does seem proven is that he intended to continue killing once he had finished in the supermarket, from where he left a few minutes after breaking in with gunfire to remain motionless before the police.

One witness said: "It seemed like he wanted to be shot."

These days, the most frequently heard rhetorical question in East Buffalo is: "What would have happened at that time if the shooter had been a black man?"

The same Saturday he went to court, and the agents searched the family home in Conklin.

At the moment, he is accused of murder in the first degree, and on Thursday he appeared in court again.

He did it handcuffed, dressed in orange, the color of prisoners in the United States, and covered by a mask.

In the room were several relatives of the victims.

One of them yelled at him: “Payton, you are a coward!”

He didn't speak.

The judge confirmed that the instruction and investigation of the case will be carried out by a popular grand jury and summoned the accused again for June 9.

The agents have already concluded the investigation at the scene of the crime, so the supermarket will be able to open again soon, which will be a relief for its neighbors, who have been stocking up on fresh products in improvised stalls placed by charities in the back of the tops.

The investigations are now focused on that moment, half an hour before the killing began, in which Gendron sent an invitation to his private Discord chat headed with the text “It's happening;

It's not a drill."

It was accepted by 15 people, who were able to access the plans that he had been hatching for months and also the live broadcast of the camera that had been placed in the helmet.

One of the attractions of this social network is the anonymity it promises its users.

The police are now trying to clarify to what extent those who accepted the invitation are complicit in the massacre.

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