For Wayne Jones, discussing the horrific supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white supremacist killed 10 people, including his mother, Celestine Chaney, has taken over much of his life these past four years.
He can numbly list talking points for media and gun violence panels. But thinking about her absence each day is one reason why Jones would not want to see the shooter sentenced to death.
“I really think that he should just sit and have to think about it year after year after year and just be miserable,” said Jones, who plans to attend the trial. “When I was younger, I probably was more prone to say ‘kill him.’ But, at this point, I mean, he’s still got well another 20-30 years of appeals.”
Jury selection is set to begin Tuesday in the federal trial in which Payton Gendron faces a potential death penalty. The attack at the Tops Friendly Market in 2022 is believed to be the deadliest hate-motivated shooting targeting Black people by a lone gunman in the last century.
Gendron is facing over two dozen federal hate crime charges and more than a dozen firearms charges. He is already spending life in prison after pleading guilty to state murder charges in a 2023 trial where he tearfully admitted to the crimes and renounced his past views.
His defense team is not going to dispute his guilt. Their sole objective is to ensure Gendron is spared from execution.
“Nothing will change the fact that Payton Gendron will die in prison,” the federal public defender office said in a statement. “At trial, we will offer mitigating evidence about Payton that the jury needs to consider in making its decision. Nothing we say or do is intended to be disrespectful or insensitive to the victims, the survivors, or their loved ones.”
Some victims’ family members, however, are not totally against the death penalty.
“I’ve never been like out here like, ‘Yay! Go for the death penalty.’ That’s never been me,” said Buffalo Common Council member Zeneta Everhart, who ran for office over a year after her son, Zaire, survived the shooting. “Ten people died that day in an egregious way and in an awful, terrible, traumatic way.”
Her son, now 25, and the two other survivors have had their lives irrevocably altered, she added.
How racist conspiracy theories played a role in the attack
On May 14, 2022, a then-18-year-old Gendron drove over 200 miles (320 kilometers) from his home in Conklin, a predominantly white and rural town, to Buffalo. He fired around 60 shots from a semiautomatic rifle at employees and shoppers. Video revealed Gendron apologized to a white store worker after shooting him in the leg. He surrendered to police as he exited the supermarket.
Investigators found past social media posts and other writings by Gendron dedicated to planning an attack to frighten people who were nonwhite and non-Christian into leaving the U.S. He also promoted a baseless “great replacement theory” that people of color will replace white people through higher birth rates and immigration.
The victims who were killed were all Black and between ages 32 and 86. Besides Chaney, they included Geraldine Talley, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Andre Mackneil, church deacon Heyward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison and Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer who was working as a security guard.
Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. Justice Department in 2024 decided to pursue a death sentence. It was the first capital case overseen by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had previously put a moratorium on the death penalty.
Gendron and his legal team relayed that he would only plead guilty in his federal case in exchange for a life sentence. The Justice Department rejected that proposal.
Anti-Black crimes still lead in hate crime data
The 2022 shooting stands apart as one of the deadliest acts of anti-Black violence in modern U.S. history. It also reflects a grim reality represented in national bias crime statistics.
Black people have been the “No. 1 numerical target” annually since the FBI began collecting data in 1991, said hate crime analyst Brian Levin of the California Association of Human Relations Organizations. The record high was 3,670 anti-Black bias incidents in 1996.
According to FBI data released in August, law enforcement agencies reported over 2,800 anti-Black hate crime incidents in 2025, nearly three times the number targeting Latinos. The FBI also reported a 7% decline in hate crime incidents from 2024 to 2025.
The Buffalo shooting and the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, in which a white gunman killed nine Black churchgoers, show how online radicalization makes this a terrorism matter as well.
“Unfortunately, he (Gendron) fits the pattern of young, mostly white males undertaking targeted massacres which are then justified by manifestos, which are also part of a continuing chain that references prior attacks often but seeks to encourage future ones,” Levin said.
Everhart, whose son still has shrapnel in his body after being shot in the neck, says hate crime enhancements might be the only deterrent.
“This isn’t a shooting over a robbery or a domestic violence situation. This is domestic terrorism,” Everhart said. “It is important we go after the death penalty in this case. But if he doesn’t end up getting it, I know that justice will be served.”
Garnell Whitfield lost his 86-year-old mother, Ruth, in the shooting. He has no thoughts on whether capital punishment should be issued because “this is the federal government doing what they deem they have to do.”
He’s spent the past four years honoring his mother’s memory by working with church groups, victims’ rights groups, gun lobbyists and others to address white nationalist movements and racial violence.
Whitfield said he hopes trial testimony reveals more about “the support that he (Gendron) might have had, the radicalization, social media and societal ills that caused people to hate and be violent that are inherent in our society” that preceded the killing.
“Those are the things that I care about,” he said.
Source: www.nbcnews.com
