The white teenager who shot and killed 10 people in a racially motivated attack on a supermarket in the city of Buffalo, New York, was detained and subjected to a mental health evaluation a year ago but released shortly afterwards, officials said Sunday. 15).
The suspect, Payton Gendron, 18, turned himself in to police on Saturday after hitting 13 people – eleven black and two white – in an attack that authorities called an act of “racially motivated violent extremism”. He apparently published a racist manifesto on the internet before the crime.
At a news conference, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said that in 2021 Gendron was arrested and subjected to a day and a half mental evaluation, but was released.
According to Gramaglia, state and federal officials had no further news about the teenager until Saturday’s shooting.
He did not give details, but according to the American press, police sources familiar with the case say that the teenager threatened, at the time, to commit a massacre at his school.
New York State Police said in a statement Sunday that on June 8, 2021, they were called by a school in Gendron’s hometown of Conklin in response to a 17-year-old student who made a threatening statement.
Without identifying Gendron, police said the student was detained and subjected to a mental health assessment at a hospital. He was not criminally charged.
“The evidence so far does not cast any doubt that this is a racist hate crime, which will be prosecuted as a hate crime,” the commissioner said, adding that it appears he acted alone.
Gendron is under surveillance for suicide risk, monitored by video and separated from other inmates, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said.
New York Governor Kathy Hochul told ABC News on Sunday that the investigation would focus on what could have been done to stop Gendron, as he had announced his views online and was on the authorities’ radar.
“I want to know what people knew and when they knew it,” she said.
racist crimes
The Buffalo shooting follows other racially motivated mass killings in recent years, including a Pittsburgh synagogue attack that left 11 dead in October 2018 and the March 2021 Atlanta spa shootings in which a white man killed eight. people, targeting Asians.
According to authorities, Gendron drove several hours from his home to Buffalo to commit the bombing, which he streamed in real time on Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com.
He then opened fire at the Tops supermarket, using a gun he bought legally but illegally modified to make it high-powered, Hochul said.
On Sunday, several dozen community members held a vigil for the victims outside the store.
Nearby, at True Bethel Baptist Church, a reverend led a service for a crowd of worshipers, including some family members of the victims and people who were in the store at the time of the shooting.
One of them was Charles Everhart Sr., 65, whose grandson Zaire Goodman, 20, worked at the supermarket. Goodman was shot in the neck but survived.
“He was pushing the carts back to the store and he was one of the first to be hit,” said Everhart.
US President Biden called the shooting “abominable to the very fabric of this nation” in a statement on Saturday.
