An 86-year-old African American gran gunned down while doing her weekend is one of 10 victims of a supermarket mass shooting.
Investigators say the massacre carried out by a white teenager in Buffalo, New York State, was motivated by racial hatred.
Also among those gunned down yesterday was a retired police officer working as a security guard.
Police said Payton Gendron, 18, shot 11 black people and two white people at the Tops Friendly Market and broadcast his rampage live on before surrendering.
Security guard Aaron Salter – a retired Buffalo police officer – fired multiple shots at Gendron, authorities said.
A bullet hit the gunman’s armour, but had no effect. Gendron then Salter, before hunting more victims.
Also was Ruth Whitfield, 86, the mother of retired Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield.
Her son told the Buffalo News that his ‘mother was a mother to the motherless’ and ‘was a blessing to us all’.
Katherine Massey, who had gone to the store to pick up some groceries, also was , according to the newspaper. Three others were left wounded by the attack.
It wasn’t immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles from his Conklin, New York, to Buffalo and that particular grocery store, in a predominantly black neighbourhood.
But 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.
Labelling the shooting as a hate crime, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said: ‘This was pure evil.’
Twitch said in a statement that it ended Gendron’s transmission ‘less than two minutes after the violence started’.
The mass shooting further unsettled a nation wracked with racial tensions, gun violence and a spate of hate crimes.
A day before, Dallas police had said they were investigating shootings in the city’s Koreatown as hate crimes.
The Buffalo attack came just a month after a shooting on a Brooklyn subway wounded 10 and just over a year after 10 were in a shooting at a Colorado supermarket.
Gendron, confronted by police in the store’s vestibule, put a rifle to his neck but was convinced to drop it.
He was arraigned later Saturday on a murder charge, appearing before a judge in a paper gown.
A law enforcement official said investigators were looking into whether he had posted a manifesto online.
The official was not permitted to speak publicly on the matter and did so on the condition of anonymity.
Buffalo police declined to comment on the document that seemingly explicates the attacker’s racist, anti-immigrant and antisemitic beliefs, including a desire to drive all those not of European descent from the US.
The document indicated he drew inspiration from the shooter who 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand, in 2019.
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