White supremacist accused of racist Buffalo shooting pleads guilty

The young white supremacist accused of having carried out a racist killing by murdering 10 black people in a supermarket in Buffalo, north of New York, pleaded this Monday guilty of racist murders and an act of terrorism.

Payton Gendron “declared himself guilty of the accusations” contained “in the indictment document”, announced, shortly after the hearing in the Erié county court, the prosecutor John Flynn, recalling the “racist” nature of these crimes, “fueled by the ideology white supremacist and deliberately targeting black people”.

After this judicial stage, Gendron, 18 years old at the time of the massacre, on May 14, “incurs a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, when he is sentenced on February 15, 2023”, by the justice of Nova York, added the prosecutor in a statement.

But he is also accused in federal court, where he risks being sentenced to death.

During his press conference, the prosecutor recalled that the young man, detained since May, had prepared his attacks meticulously and that I had equipped myself with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle, a portable camera to film his killings and publicize her on the social network Twitch.

After the Buffalo massacre, the state of New York, the fourth most populated in the US, with more than 20 million inhabitants, governed by Democrat Kathy Hochul, raised the minimum age for acquiring semi-automatic weapons from 18 to 21 years.

According to the Gun Violence Archive website, more than 600 shootings with multiple victims — the criteria is a minimum of four dead or injured — have taken place in the US since the beginning of this year.

About 49,000 people were killed by gunfire in the US in 2021, after 45,000 in 2020, which had already been a record. This represents more than 130 deaths a day, of which more than half are suicides.