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U.S. President Joe Biden said the Justice Department is investigating the shooting as a hate crime, adding, “We must all work together to address the hate that remains a stain on the soul of America.”
The shooter was identified as Payton Gendron, of Conklin, a New York state community about 320 kilometers southeast of Buffalo. He is white and 11 of the 13 shooting victims were Black.
Law enforcement officials in the northeastern U.S. city of Buffalo, New York, worked Sunday to piece together the background of the teenage gunman who opened fire in a grocery store, killing 10 people and wounding three in what authorities described as “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown told CBS’s “Face the Nation” show that police “are going through every element, every detail in this shooter’s background to piece together why this happened, how this happened, and the reason that this person came to the city of Buffalo to perpetrate this horrific crime.”
Authorities say he carried out the mayhem mid-Saturday afternoon while wearing military gear and livestreaming it with a helmet camera. He eventually dropped his weapon and surrendered to police inside the Tops Friendly Market, located in a predominantly Black neighborhood in the city of 278,000 people.
“We are certainly saddened that someone drove from hundreds of miles away, someone not from this community that did not know this community that came here to take as many Black lives as possible, who did this in a willful, premeditated fashion, planning this,” said Brown, who is Buffalo’s first Black mayor.