- A racist massacre killed at least ten people in Buffalo, New York, overnight from Saturday to Sunday.
- The alleged perpetrator of the shooting is an 18-year-old young man from a town 300 km away.
- Payton S. Gendron, who broadcast his attack live, posted a 180-page racist manifesto on the Internet.
A racist massacre killed at least ten people in Buffalo, New York, overnight from Saturday to Sunday. The alleged perpetrator of the shooting is an 18-year-old young man from a town 300 km away. Payton S. Gendron, who broadcast his attack live, posted a 180-page racist manifesto on the Internet.
At least ten people were shot and several others were injured as he progressed through the aisles of the store. Eleven of the victims were identified by police as black people, living in this predominantly African-American area of Buffalo. The young supremacist would have chosen the place of his attack for this particularity: this district is at the top of the ranking by postal code of the places in the State of New York where this community is the most represented.
The racist dimension of the attack committed by this 18-year-old young man is beyond doubt: “We are investigating this incident as both a hate crime and a case of racially motivated violent extremism” , a so declared FBI spokesman in Buffalo, Stephen Belongia. Gendron has indeed published on the Internet a 180-page “manifesto” to justify his act, without ambiguity as to its nature , where he defines himself as ” racist, fascist and anti-Semitic ” .
According to this text published via the Google Drive application, white Americans are threatened by other ethnic groups, an antiphon from the far right which signs an explicit adherence to the theory of the “great replacement”, popularized by the Frenchman Renaud Camus . The young murderer also refers, in a hateful logorrhea, to the massacre of the Christchurch mosques, perpetrated in 2019 in New Zealand by an Australian far-right activist who, in a manifesto, claimed to be of the same ideological affiliation.
Another “reference” cited by Gendron: Dylann Roof, who killed nine black parishioners in 2015 in a church in Charleston, South Carolina, and who has since been sentenced to death. The American press also notes that the majority of the killings that have shaken the country in the last decade are motivated by this same fear of a supposed replacement.
Former classmates of Payton Gendron, located by the Washington Post , remember a quiet and rather intelligent young man, “always a little eccentric, but never disturbing” , according to one of them. Another, Eddie Serow, who knew him without really rubbing shoulders with him, at Susquehanna Valley High School, had been contacted by Gendron last November, when he had learned that he had land to practice shooting.
The two teenagers had then spent several hours in the forest, shooting aimlessly with a conventional rifle and an assault rifle. Serow, on the other hand, never suspected racist overtones in his comrade, whom he says he discovered like everyone else in the manifesto published online.
Payton S. Gendron lived in a small town of just over 5,000 inhabitants, overwhelmingly white, where the black community represents less than 1% of the population. If we can note a slight demographic erosion of the rural town of Conklin, and the recession which hits the larger neighboring town of Binghamton, it is still impossible, at this stage of the investigation, to grasp what, in the environment or in the personal history of the young man, could lead him to the most extreme theories and to commit one of the worst racist killings in the United States.