19-year-old Payton Gendron who drove to a Buffalo supermarket with a rifle and opened fire, killing 10 people and wounding 3 will be spending the rest of his life behind bars.
Gendron pleaded guilty to 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime and three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime, as well as other assorted charges.
The teenager is also facing federal hate crime charges that could carry the death penalty.
On May 14, he put on military gear while live streaming with a camera in his helmet and drove to the supermarket in a predominantly black area of Buffalo with his loaded rifle. In what the authorities described as a “racially motivated violent extremism”, Gendron shot 11 black and two white victims before surrendering to the police while streaming the entire thing on Twitch.
The defendant, who was 18 at the time of the attack, is the first person to be charged under a 2020 New York law against domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which carries an automatic sentence of life without parole.
According to investigators, Gendron drove more than 200 miles to the majority-black neighborhood on May 14. He had allegedly posted a manifesto online prior to the shooting, invoking the racist “great replacement” conspiracy theory that white people such as himself were being systematically “replaced” by non-white people.
