In May 2022, a horrific attack shook the city of New York. Armed with a rifle, Payton Gendron crashes into a supermarket and kills ten African Americans. The then 18-year-old broadcast the crime live on the Internet via a helmet camera. A court now sentences him to life imprisonment.
Nine months after the racially motivated attack on a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, which left ten dead, the perpetrator has been sentenced to life imprisonment. An early release of 19-year-old Payton Gendron is excluded, as the responsible judge Susan Eagan emphasized in Buffalo. “You will never see the light of day again as a free man.” Gendron pleaded guilty to all charges in November, including 10 counts of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism. The sentence has now been announced.
The court hearing to determine the sentence was temporarily interrupted by riots. As a victim’s relative spoke, as is usual at such hearings, a man attempted to attack the accused. Police officers intervened and escorted Gendron, dressed in an orange prison suit, out of the courtroom. The meeting resumed after a brief interruption.
On May 14, the then 18-year-old white man attacked a supermarket in Buffalo that was mostly frequented by blacks. The white man, armed with a semi-automatic rifle, shot dead ten African Americans in front of and inside the store and injured three other people. During the attack, he wore a helmet with a camera, which he used to broadcast the attack live on the online platform Twitch.
Gendron had been preparing the attack for months. He chose the supermarket because mostly black people live in the area. For the attack, he traveled from his hometown of Conklin, more than 320 kilometers away. On Tuesday, Gendron apologized to the family for his actions. “I cannot express how much I regret my decisions,” said the 19-year-old. “I did something terrible that day. I shot people because they were black.” Gendron was also charged by the federal judiciary with a hate crime. Theoretically, the 19-year-old faces the death penalty in this process.
The United States is repeatedly shaken by gun attacks with many deaths. Most recently, a 43-year-old shot dead three students on a university campus in the state of Michigan on Monday. In the United States, where gun ownership is enshrined in the Constitution, it is estimated that there are more than 393 million firearms in public possession. That means 120 firearms for every 100 residents. According to the specialist website Gun Violence Archive, more than 20,200 people were killed by guns last year, not including suicides. Attempts to tighten gun laws regularly fail due to opposition from conservative Republicans and the powerful gun lobby.
