Police study the 180-page manifesto he describes as a mishmash of his plans and conspiracy theories
The 13 victims Payton Gendron listed Saturday in his newly released list of sarcastic supremacism were just the beginning. “He would get in his car and drive down Jefferson Avenue to continue doing the same thing,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Josep Gramaglia said Monday.
The swift action of its agents managed to stop the blood orgy with which it sought to gain a foothold on the list of the world’s most famous shootings with a racial hatred component. The pandemic had given him plenty of time to delve into the internet, fascinated by the Great Replacement conspiracy theory that he learned mostly from the manifesto left by the author of the 2019 New Zealand mosque massacre, Brenton Tarrat. To overcome his fifty deaths, many blacks had to be killed, such as those he chased down the aisles of the Tops Friendly Market supermarket, chosen specifically for being the heart of a densely populated neighborhood of African Americans.
He left all this and more in his own 180-page statement that the police are carefully studying to fit the puzzle of yet another massacre. He will be easier to explain, but not to understand, because that “hodgepodge” of conspiracy and racist theories, as the police commissioner described it, makes his motives very clear. In fact, New York State Governor Kathy Hochul, a native of Buffalo, was the first to call him a white supremacist on the same Saturday, when still no one dared to ignore the presumption of innocence.
This Tuesday, President Joe Biden and his wife will come to Buffalo ready to comfort the African American community that lost some of its historic civil rights fighters in the massacre. Biden will focus not so much on guns, a losing battle, as on the need to fight racism, which is the country’s cardinal sin and yet, “it has no place in the US,” the White House announced.
New York is one of the few states where “red flag” laws allow authorities to act and prevent the acquisition of weapons when there are signs they could be used to kill others. The 18-year-old had given enough clues. In fact, in June last year, police received a call from his institute, where he had made “widespread threats” that left someone fearing the worst. The appeal was to put him in a psychiatric center for a day and a half to evaluate him, but the outcome is unknown if the authorities used it to invoke those red warning laws that could have prevented the massacre.
Since then, Gendron has been planning his plan to find a place for himself among those who want to “awaken” the white man to prevent “colored” people from exterminating them. And for supremacists, Hispanics are part of the people of color. In fact, also in 2019 another like him, Patrick Wood, started shooting with those who bought a shopping center in El Paso to equip their kids for back to school. The massacre left 23 dead and a new hate speech on social networks.
If the young man from Buffalo with childhood acne was better at something than she was, it was in the guts to want to broadcast it live through a camera mounted on his helmet. It wasn’t long before authorities ended the broadcast, which no longer appears on the Twitch platform, which is owned by Twitter. Some have managed to cherish a screenshot, that’s all.
The first three dead were left in the parking lot. He shot into the grocery store and met the security guard, Aaron Salter, an ex-cop who had sought a quieter fate there and died instead. Glory too, because police said he wore the gunman’s torso at least once, only Gendron was wearing a bulletproof vest that allowed him to fend off the shot and continue his massacre coolly for another minute. He finished the blacks on the ground, he apologized to the whites if he accidentally aimed at them.
What he has accomplished is for the first time a Republican congresswoman to denounce her party’s complicity in the spread of white supremacy. Except that Liz Cheney had been a Republican Party pariah since paying tribute to Donald Trump and the 74 million votes he got in the last election.
Source: La Verdad
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