Feds Interview Buffalo Supermarket Shooting Suspect’s Parents

Federal agents interviewed the parents of the teenager accused of shooting and killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket and served multiple search warrants, a law enforcement official told The Associated Press on Sunday.

Payton Gendron’s parents were cooperating with investigators, the official said. The official was not authorized to discuss details of the investigation into the Saturday afternoon shooting publicly and spoke to AP on condition of anonymity.

Federal authorities were still working to confirm the authenticity of a 180-page manifesto that was posted online, which detailed the plot and identified the 18-year-old by name as the gunman, the official said. Authorities say the shooting was motivated by racial hatred.

A preliminary investigation found the suspected gunman had repeatedly visited sites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, the official said.

It wasn’t immediately clear why the 18-year-old had traveled about 200 miles from his Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, but investigators believe he had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Market and had been searching for communities with a high number of African American residents, the official said. The market is located in a predominantly Black neighborhood.

“It’s just too much. I’m trying to bear witness but it’s just too much. You can’t even go to the damn store in peace,” Buffalo resident Yvonne Woodard told the AP. “It’s just crazy.”

In a Sunday interview with ABC, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said that the gunman had been in town “at least the day before.”

“It seems that he had come here to scope out the area, to do a little reconnaissance work on the area before he carried out his just evil, sickening act,” Gramaglia said.

Police said gunman shot, in total, 11 Black people and two white people Saturday in a rampage that the 18-year-old broadcast live before surrendering to authorities. Screenshots purporting to be from the Twitch broadcast appear to show a racial epithet scrawled on the rifle used in the attack, as well as the number 14, a likely reference to a white supremacist slogan.

“We pray for their families. But after we pray — after we get up off of our knees — we’ve got to demand change. We’ve got to demand justice,” state Attorney General Letitia James said an emotional church service in Buffalo on Sunday morning. “This was domestic terrorism, plain and simple.”

NY Gov. Kathy Hochul, at a news conference in Buffalo following a mass shooting, demanded social media platforms do more to monitor hate content and prevent its spread.

New York Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, called for the tech industry to take responsibility for their role in propagating hate speech in a Sunday interview with ABC.

“The CEOs of those companies need to be held accountable and assure all of us that they’re taking every step humanly possible to be able to monitor this information. How these depraved ideas are fermenting on social media – it’s spreading like a virus now,” she said, adding that a lack of oversight could lead to others emulating the shooter.

President Joe Biden released a statement late Saturday offering prayers for victims’ families, thanking first responders and calling for action “to end hate-fueled domestic terrorism.”

“Any act of domestic terrorism, including an act perpetrated in the name of a repugnant white nationalist ideology, is antithetical to everything we stand for in America,” he said in the statement, acknowledging law enforcement is still working to confirm the motivations behind the shooting. “Hate must have no safe harbor.”

Photos: Supermarket Mass Shooting in Buffalo, NY Buffalo Shooter Manifesto

The shooter appears to have posted an apparent manifesto online late Thursday night, according to NBC News, with details of a planned crime that match exactly Saturday’s shooting. It shows a shared birth date and biographical details in common with the suspect.

A senior law enforcement official told NBC News they were aware of the document and were working to confirm the author.

The virulently racist and anti-Semitic tract makes clear the gunman targeted Buffalo because of the size of the city’s Black population. It adopts the “great replacement” conspiracy theory that falsely alleges Jews are working to replace white Americans with people of color.

In the document, the author claims that he was radicalized on an extremist 4chan forum while he was “bored” at the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic in early 2020. It also makes frequently nods to the white supremacist who killed 51 people in New Zealand in 2019.