Buffalo shooting suspect Payton Gendron heckled in court: ‘You’re a coward!’
Without his big gun, the accused Buffalo gunman didn’t look so tough.
Payton Gendron, 18, who cops say killed 10 Black people at a Tops Friendly Market last week, was led into court Thursday in handcuffs, wearing orange prison clothes and a white face mask.
“Payton, you’re a coward!” someone yelled from the courtroom gallery at the man accused of putting his twisted, racist “great replacement theory” into evil action by opening fire with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle.
Gendron appeared at the proceeding attended by some victims’ relatives. His indictment was actually approved on Wednesday, so the hearing was adjourned without any testimony taking place.
He is being held without bail. His next court appearance will be on June 9 for arraignment.
Payton Gendron is led into the courtroom for a hearing at Erie County Court, in Buffalo, N.Y., Thursday, May 19, 2022. (Matt Rourke/)
Gendron was accompanied by half a dozen sheriff’s deputies during the four-minute hearing.
Spectators had to pass through metal detectors to enter the courthouse, spectators and were then screened by K-9 dogs before entering the courtroom, the Washington Post reported.
There were no fireworks during or after the hearing. District attorney John Flynn said his office would not comment as his office — which is considering hate-crimes charges — continues to investigate.
Gendron’s lawyers and family members of the victims declined comment to reporters.
Gendron allegedly drove hours from Conklin, N.Y., to the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo and opened fire Saturday afternoon, shooting 13 people and killing 10 of them. Of the 13 victims, 11 were Black, including all the fatalities.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said, calling the massacre a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
Payton Gendron is led into the courtroom for a hearing at Erie County Court in Buffalo on Thursday. (Matt Rourke/)
In a 180-page manifesto in Gendron’s name, he wrote that he targeted Buffalo because it had the “highest Black percentage that is close enough to where I live.” He also allegedly had the N-word painted on the barrel of his modified assault weapon.
“We have uncovered information that if he escaped the supermarket, he had plans to continue his attack,” Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said earlier in the week. “He had plans to continue driving down Jefferson Ave. to shoot more Black people ... possibly go to another store [or] location.”
Instead, Gendron was talked out of shooting himself at the grocery store Saturday and was taken into custody. He pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder Saturday night and is being held without bail.
The Department of Justice is investigating the shooting as a “hate crime and an act of racially-motivated violent extremism.”
Police secure an area around a supermarket where several people were killed in a shooting, Saturday, May 14, 2022 in Buffalo, N.Y. (Derek Gee /)
Gendron, allegedly describing himself as a fascist, a white supremacist and an anti-Semite, wrote fondly of Christchurch shooter Brenton Tarrant, who murdered 51 people at two New Zealand mosques in 2019; Dylann Roof, who killed nine Black people at a church in South Carolina in 2015; and Anders Breivik, who killed 77 people in Norway in 2011.
Even before Saturday, Gendron was allegedly doing reconnaissance in the area.
A manager at Tops told the Daily News Sunday that she saw Gendron lurking around the shop on Friday, a day before the shooting.
“He was acting like he was homeless and needed change,” Shonnell Teague told The News. “He really was checking out the store.”
Buffalo mass shooter Payton S. Gendron is seen in a booking photo from May 15, 2022
In a nearly 600-page document, again allegedly written by Gendron and obtained by The Washington Post, the shooting suspect encountered a security guard outside the grocery store in March, and told the employee he was “collecting consensus data.”
“In hindsight that was a close call,” Gendron allegedly wrote.
Sprinkled throughout both documents was repeated talk of the Great Replacement Theory, a racist conspiracy theory that white people are being systematically wiped out.
With News Wire Services
