[Buffalo residents say the supermarket shooter being put in prison
isnt enough — they want more justice. ]
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THE BUFFALO MASSACRE HAPPENED A YEAR AGO — AND RACISM IS STILL VERY
MUCH ALIVE IN THE CITY  
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Phillip Jackson
May 14, 2023
Huff Post
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_ Buffalo residents say the supermarket shooter being put in prison
isn't enough — they want more justice. _

Police walk outside the Tops grocery store on May 15, 2022, in
Buffalo, New York. , JOSHUA BESSEX/ASSOCIATED PRESS

 

One year ago, Brooklyn Hough was a cashier at Tops Friendly Market,
located on Buffalo’s east side. She was 22 years old and working to
support her two children. Hough was just going out for her lunch break
on a typical, quiet Saturday.

Then Payton Gendron arrived at the store. He carried out a racist
shooting spree that would shock the nation and traumatize the city.

Hough heard gunshots and then screaming. At first, she thought the
store was getting robbed. She fled through the back of the store.

“I did not see the killing, but I did see the bodies,” Hough told
HuffPost.

She tried to call her boyfriend but his phone was dead, so she called
her mother. Her mother could hear other people screaming, too.

Gendron murdered 10 Black people and injured three others. In his
180-page manifesto, the 18-year-old said he was fighting back against
the “Great Replacement,” a dangerous white supremacist ideology
that claims the government and Democrats
[[link removed]] are
deliberately replacing ethnic Europeans with non-Europeans to gain
political and cultural advantage.

[Brooklyn Hough, 23, is pictured in Buffalo on May 13, 2023. Hough was
a cashier at the Tops supermarket when the massacre that killed 10
people happened last year, and she survived.]

Brooklyn Hough, 23, is pictured in Buffalo on May 13, 2023. Hough was
a cashier at the Tops supermarket when the massacre that killed 10
people happened last year, and she survived.  HEATHER AINSWORTH FOR
HUFFPOST

In February, a state judge gave Gendron 11 consecutive life sentences
without the possibility of parole. Right before the judge handed down
his sentence, a family member of one victim berated the shooter and
another man lunged at him, which temporarily halted the proceedings.

For Hough and others in Buffalo, the shooter’s calculated acts of
violence caused pain that will exist for generations in the community.
The May 14 shooting is remembered by local activists as “514.”

The grocery store shut down after the killings, though it’s now
open. Hough had to find other ways to pay her bills and support her
young children, so she took another job working as a cashier
elsewhere. Along the way, she became a part of a support group with
local activist Myles Carter and others that discusses demands on
behalf of the massacre survivors and help for their predominantly
Black community.

Hough and Carter both remember when President Joe Biden came to town
in the days after the tragedy. He talked with the family members who
lost loved ones and the people who were injured, though Hough wishes
he had met with other people who were in the store, too.

Ten days after the shooting, another 18-year-old went to Uvalde,
Texas, and fatally shot 19 children and two teachers inside a school.
Seventeen others were injured but survived the attack. National
attention quickly turned to Texas.

[President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit a memorial near a
Tops grocery store in Buffalo on May 17, 2022.]

President Joe Biden and first lady Jill Biden visit a memorial near a
Tops grocery store in Buffalo on May 17, 2022.  NICHOLAS KAMM VIA
GETTY IMAGES

Carter says that Black people and Black communities have been
terrorized for years — and that locking up the killers, while
necessary, isn’t enough.

“For us, Payton Gendron is the person who injured us. But Payton
Gendron is a foot soldier in the sea of white supremacy. We don’t
have any real justice here because he is one of many. And you can see
it happening in history over and over again,” he said.

Racism existed in Buffalo long before Gendron — he wasn’t even the
first killer to target the city’s Black population.

Four decades ago, a serial killer preyed on Black men in the city,
despite residents’ pleas for police to connect the dots and stop the
violence. Beginning in 1980, a man named Joseph Christopher slayed men
with a .22 caliber pistol, seemingly at random except with regard to
their race — they were all Black men.

Local Black leaders called on city officials to investigate the
killings as a conspiracy, but members of law enforcement were still
working to draw connections between them.

The killings caught the attention of national civil rights activist
Rev. Jesse Jackson at the time, who was working with his Rainbow PUSH
Coalition. Jackson came to Buffalo to meet with more than 600 Black
residents in the area.

During the funeral for one of the victims, a carload of white people
drove by showing a mannequin with red-painted head wounds and threw
red paint on the victim’s funeral hearse.

Christopher was ultimately arrested for killing a 14-year-old Black
boy and three men, though he was suspected of many other murders,
including those of some Black men who were mutilated or even had their
hearts ripped out.

[A chalk figure shows where the body of Ernest Jones was found in
Tonawanda, New York, on Oct. 9, 1980. Jones, 40, was the second black
male killed and mutilated in the Buffalo suburb in two days and the
sixth murdered in the prior month. ]

A chalk figure shows where the body of Ernest Jones was found in
Tonawanda, New York, on Oct. 9, 1980. Jones, 40, was the second black
male killed and mutilated in the Buffalo suburb in two days and the
sixth murdered in the prior month.  DENNIS FLOSS/ASSOCIATED PRESS

To this day, the city is plagued by instances of racism, including
some emanating from the Buffalo police. In 2006, a Black officer named
Cariol Horne was fired from the department and lost her pension after
she stopped a fellow officer from choking a Black man while he was
handcuffed.

Fourteen years later, in the aftermath of George Floyd’s murder,
Buffalo would adopt what would become known as “Cariol’s Law,”
which requires officers to intervene if another officer is using
excessive force.

More recently, Buffalo Police Capt. Amber Beyer 
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named in a lawsuit and reassigned within the department after Black
staff said she went on a racist tirade. The suit describes Beyer
launching into a 20-minute rant and saying that Black men were all
unfaithful to their wives and that Black people commit more crime than
white people.

“White officers get PTSD from working in Black neighborhoods —
like the East Side of Buffalo — but Black officers do not because
they are used to violence and Black people commit more violent crime
than White people,” Beyer allegedly said, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleged that Beyer discriminated against Black
employees by offering overtime hours to white officers with the least
seniority to attend conferences and events.

Beyer was reassigned
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the department and admitted to violating its rules and regulations
after she received a 30-day unpaid suspension. She took implicit bias
training
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an internal affairs review.

[Local Buffalo activist Myles Carter stands in front of a memorial
wall dedicated to the victims of the Tops supermarket massacre,
located across the street from the supermarket.]

Local Buffalo activist Myles Carter stands in front of a memorial wall
dedicated to the victims of the Tops supermarket massacre, located
across the street from the supermarket.  HEATHER AINSWORTH FOR
HUFFPOST

Carter himself is suing the city’s police department after police
tackled and arrested him while he was being interviewed
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a local television station in June 2020 amid protests following the
murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The video went viral and
Carter was charged with obstruction of governmental administration and
disorderly conduct, though those charges were dropped the following
month.

Carter does not believe there was any change in his city after the
mass shooting. “The people who are dealing with the tragedy of 514
are still locked in their houses and not working,” he said.

Carter and Hough want financial and mental support for survivors,
reimbursement for purchases made at Tops on the day of the shooting
and support for self-defense training.

While Hough was working at Tops, the state increased the minimum wage
to $13.20, but it still was not enough to make ends meet. She would
like Buffalo Public Schools, the school district from which she
graduated, to get much more attention and money.

Five city schools
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recently included on a list of underfunded and high-needs schools in
the state, according to a report from the New York State Education
Department. (In March 2021, Democratic New York Rep. Brian
Higgins announced
[[link removed]] Buffalo
schools would receive $814 million plus an additional $232 million
from the American Rescue Plan.)

Meanwhile, Hough harbors a deep worry that more young white males are
being influenced by racist mass murders.

“These kids are getting these ideas that they don’t like Black
people. There are evil people in this world waking up and wanting to
kill people. Taking mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and uncles
from their family. And it is happening too much,” Hough said.

She said that if people make it out of Buffalo, that is an
accomplishment. She and other survivors and activists are calling for
more work opportunities for Black people.

“If you get out of Buffalo and you are successful, kudos to you,”
Hough said. “I feel like the state and government designed Buffalo
to be like this; no one is motivated to try to make it.”

And she is still waiting for the government to do something about gun
violence in the country.

“This is America, this is what they do. Before this, there was
another one and another one. And it is the same cycle, nothing being
done for people and nothing being done for gun violence.”

[A memorial stands in front of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo on May
13, 2023.]

A memorial stands in front of the Tops supermarket in Buffalo on May
13, 2023.

_Phillip Jackson is a social justice reporter with HuffPost. Before
this, he worked as a criminal justice reporter with the Baltimore Sun.
Jackson has appeared on MSNBC with Lawrence O'Donnell and has worked
in Philadelphia and Memphis covering policing, race and protests.
Phillip can be reached at [email protected] or on Twitter
at @phillej__

* Buffalo murders
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* Racism
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* police brutality
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