Gunman kills 10 in live-streamed racial attack on New York state supermarket
An 18-year-old white gunman shot dead 10 people and wounded three others on Saturday at a grocery store in a Black neighborhood of upstate New York, before surrendering after what authorities called an act of “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Authorities said the suspect, who was armed with an assault-style rifle and appeared to have acted alone, drove to Buffalo from his home several hours away to launch the afternoon attack that he broadcast in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com (AMZN.O), Reuters reported.
Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were Black, officials said. The two others were white. The racial breakdown of the dead was not made clear, Reuters reported.
Court papers named the suspect as Payton Gendron of Conklin, a town of about 5,000 people in New York’s Southern Tier region near the Pennsylvania border.
He was arraigned hours after the shooting in state court on first-degree murder charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn.
Flynn said the judge also ordered Gendron to remain in custody without bail and to undergo a “forensic examination.” Gendron was scheduled to return to court on May 19.
“This person was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said at a news conference. “It was a straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul told a late-evening news conference she was dismayed that the killer managed to live-stream his attack on social media, which she blamed for hosting a “feeding frenzy” of violent extremist ideology.
“The fact that that can even be posted on a platform is absolutely shocking,” Hochul said. “These outlets must be more vigilant in monitoring social media content.”
Twitch said in a statement that it removed the livestream less than two minutes after it started and was working to ensure no other accounts re-posted the content.
Screenshots of the broadcast were posted on social media, including some that appeared to show the shooter holding a gun and standing over a body in the grocery store.
A document circulating online that appeared to have been written by the killer sketched out a to-do list for the attack, including cleaning the gun and testing the livestream.The post Gunman kills 10 in live-streamed racial attack on New York state supermarket first appeared on Ariana News.
Source: Ariana News
