The booking photo of Payton S. Gendron (Erie County District Attorney via FOX News) BUFFALO, N.Y. (AP) - The white gunman who killed 10 Black people in a racist attack at a Buffalo supermarket has been charged with federal hate crimes, according to a criminal complaint filed Wednesday.Payton Gendron had already faced a mandatory life sentence without parole if convicted on previously filed state charges in the May 14 rampage which also left three survivors — one Black, two white — with gunshot wounds.U.S.
Attorney General Merrick Garland was in Buffalo on Wednesday to visit with the families of 10 Black people killed in a white gunman's racist attack on a supermarket.Gendron is already facing up to life in prison if convicted on state charges in the May 14 rampage, which also left three survivors — one Black, two white — with gunshot wounds.Gendron's radical, racist worldview and extensive preparation for the Tops Friendly Market attack are laid out in documents he apparently authored and posted online shortly before the attack.The documents embrace a baseless conspiracy theory about a plot to diminish white Americans' power and "replace" them with people of color, through immigration and other means.The posts detail months of reconnaissance, demographic research and shooting practice for a bloodbath aimed at scaring everyone who isn't white and Christian into leaving the country.Gendron drove more than 200 miles (320 kilometers) from his home in a nearly all-white town near the New York-Pennsylvania border to a predominantly Black part of Buffalo.
There, authorities say, he mowed down shoppers and workers using an AR-15-style rifle, wearing body armor to protect himself and livestreaming the carnage from a.