10 killed in racially motivated shooting at Buffalo grocery store

Ten people were killed during a mass shooting Saturday afternoon at a Buffalo grocery store in what law enforcement officials described as a racially motivated hate crime.

Law enforcement authorities said Payton Gendron, an 18-year-old White man, approached the store in a predominantly Black neighborhood and opened fire on shoppers and employees, shooting 13 people including a security guard.

The massacre ended when Gendron surrendered to police outside the store. Later Saturday, he was charged with first-degree murder and held without bail. He pleaded not guilty.

Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office, said law enforcement officials were investigating the shooting as a hate crime and a case of racially motivated violent extremism. Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said 11 of the 13 people shot were Black.Gramaglia added that the gunman, who was heavily armed and wearing tactical gear, used a camera to live-stream the attack and shot several victims in the parking lot before entering the store.

The grocery’s longtime security guard fired back, but the gunman’s body armor blocked the shot, and the guard was killed in the encounter, Gramaglia said. He called the security guard a “hero.” Four of those killed were store employees and six were customers, law enforcement officials said.

One of the customers was 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, who had stopped at Tops after spending the day taking care of her husband at his nursing home.

“There’s very few days that she did not spend time with him, attending to him,” said her son, retired Buffalo fire commissioner Garnell W. Whitfield. “She was his angel.”

Now the family is rallying around his father to make sure he’s cared for. “Something she would be proud of us for,” Whitfield said. “So we’ve got a big task ahead of us.”