Buffalo white supremacist supermarket gunman sentenced to life without parole

15 February 2023

On Wednesday, February 15, white supremacist gunman Peyton Gendron was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole for the racially motivated mass shooting that he carried out at a supermarket in a predominantly African-American area of Buffalo on May 14, 2022. That act of terrorism left ten people dead.

In November, Gendron, now 19, pled guilty to multiple charges from New York State, including one charge of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. Altogether, that indictment included 25 counts, which ranged from ten first-degree murder charges to three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime.

Gendron shot 13 people in a Tops supermarket that day. Although ten of them died, three were injured but survived. And 11 of his 13 victims were Black.

During Gendron’s February 15 hearing, the Daily Beast reports, there was considerable tension in the courtroom. Barbara Massey, whose 72-year-old sister Katherine Massey was among the gunman’s victims, emotionally told him, "We love our kids. We never go in no neighborhoods and take people out." After that, a man wearing a gray sweatsuit rushed towards Gendron but was held back by court security, and Gendron was removed from the courtroom for his protection. One of the people in the courtroom could be heard telling the man in the sweatsuit, "Don’t do it."

When Gendron was brought back into the courtroom, the judge handed down the sentence.

The February 15 hearing was strictly for New York State charges; Gendron, Axios notes, is still facing "27 felony charges in federal court," including "multiple counts of hate crimes" that he has "pleaded not guilty” to.

Interviewed the day of the sentencing, Buffalo resident Rose Wysocki — a Tops employee and one of the survivors of Gendron’s attack — told NBC News, "He can say I’m sorry a million times over, and it’s not going to mean much, honestly. We who were there that day and survived, we live with this every single day."

The May 14, 2022 attack in Buffalo came at a time when acts of domestic terrorism by far-right white supremacists, white nationalists and neo-Nazi groups are on the rise in the U.S. Other mass shootings have included one in El Paso, Texas on August 3, 2019 and the massacre at the Tree of Life synagogue on October 27, 2018. On November 19, 2022, Club Q — a gay nightclub in Colorado Springs — was the target of an attack that left five people dead and more than a dozen others seriously injured.

Another act of domestic terrorism occurred in Charleston, South Carolina on June 17, 2015, when white supremacist Dylann Roof carried out a racially motivated mass shooting at the Bethel AME Church that left nine Black churchgoers dead. Roof is now serving life in prison.

The targets of these attacks have varied: Latinos in El Paso, African-Americans in Buffalo and Charleston, Jews in Pittsburgh, gays in Colorado Springs. But all of the attacks underscore the dangers posed by white supremacist and white nationalist ideology.

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