Security guard challenged alleged Buffalo shooter two months earlier, according to online account
A security guard confronted alleged Buffalo supermarket shooter Payton Gendron during an apparent reconnaissance trip two months ago.
“I’ve seen you go in and out … What are you doing?” the guard asked Gendron, 18, on March 8, according to a nearly 600-page document posted online, ostensibly by Gendron, that was obtained by The Washington Post.
He told the guard he was “collecting consensus data” and then left, noting, “In hindsight that was a close call,” according to The Washington Post.
The 589-page document was posted on April 29, referring to the supermarket as “attack area 1″ and describing his plan to hit two other locations and gun down more than three dozen people in all.
Meticulous maps of the Tops store layout were included in the report on the March 8 visit. The writer noted the presence of “many Blacks” at the cash registers. An accounting done by the document writer noted that there were 53 Black people and six white people inside the store at that time.
It was found on a messaging platform known as Discord by someone named jimboboiii, a handle that Gendron used on other platforms, The Washington Post said. The newspaper traced its path to a filesharing platform, MediaFire, and was later removed.
The documents were being preserved for law enforcement and the account disabled, MediaFire’s chief executive told The Washington Post.
Gendron is being held without bail after pleading not guilty to 10 counts of murder after driving about 200 miles from Conklin, N.Y., near Binghamton, specifically to shoot Black people in Buffalo. He planned to continue his rampage at other locations, police said Monday.
Clad in body armor and filming with a helmet camera, he allegedly massacred customers, a security guard and store employees alike on Saturday with an AR-15 style rifle in a blatantly racist attack. Eleven of the 13 people shot were Black. Victims ranged in age from 20 to 86.
In other online filings, Gendron said he was inspired by several other mass shooters, including the gunman who murdered 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019; the killer of nine Black people at a South Caroline church in 2015, and a Norwegian gunman who ended 77 lives in Norway in 2011.
He pleaded not guilty to the murder charges and may face hate crime or domestic terror charges, The Associated Press noted. He is also under suicide watch, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia told CNN.
No amount of justice could bring the victims back, their relatives said Monday.
“We’re not just hurting. We’re angry. We’re mad,” former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield Jr., whose 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, was among the dead, said at a news conference with civil rights attorney Ben Crump on Monday.
With News Wire Services
