Jury selection begins in hate crimes trial for Buffalo supermarket gunman
Trial could see white supremacist who killed 10 people in New York state store get the death penalty Jury selection is set to begin Tuesday in the trial that could see the white supremacist who killed 10 people in a 2022 Buffalo supermarket get the death penalty. The attack is believed to be the deadliest shooting targeting Black people in modern history. Continue reading...
Jury selection is set to commence in the trial of Payton Gendron, the white supremacist accused of killing ten Black individuals at a Buffalo supermarket in 2022. The attack is considered the deadliest shooting targeting Black people in modern history. Gendron, who faces more than two dozen federal hate crime charges and a dozen firearms charges, is already serving a life sentence for state murder charges.
His defense team aims to argue that Gendron should not receive the death penalty, focusing on offering mitigating evidence to the jury. While some victims' family members support the death penalty, others do not. Gendron traveled over 200 miles from his rural home to Buffalo on May 14, 2022, to carry out the shooting. He fired around 60 shots from a semiautomatic rifle at employees and shoppers before surrendering to police.
Investigators discovered Gendron's online writings and social media posts, which outlined his plan to scare non-white and non-Christian people out of the US and promote the false "great replacement theory." The ten victims, aged 32 to 86, were all Black. This tragic event highlights the ongoing issue of bias crimes against Black people in the US, which have been the "number one numerical target" since FBI data collection began in 1991.
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