Buffalo Massacre Suspect Shared Five Months’ Worth Of Plans With Group 30 Minutes Before Attack — No One Alerted Authorities

By Daniel Nyamekye

Payton Gendron record­ed his plans to car­ry out the racial mas­sacre in East Buffalo for months in a chat on the Discord social media plat­form, reports show. Just 30 min­utes before the white suprema­cist fired his first set of rounds in the Tops Friendly Markets in the Black neigh­bor­hood Saturday, he invit­ed a small group of peo­ple to the pri­vate chat room to see his plans.

Gendron’s goal was to kill three dozen Black peo­ple, he said in the mes­sages. No one in the cha­t­room alert­ed author­i­ties, accord­ing to reports. He killed 10 Black peo­ple on Saturday. 

“What we know at this time is that a pri­vate, invite-only serv­er was cre­at­ed by the sus­pect to serve as a per­son­al diary chat log,” Discord offi­cials said in a statement.

“Approximately 30 min­utes pri­or to the attack, how­ev­er, a small group of peo­ple were invit­ed to and joined the serv­er. Before that, our records indi­cate no oth­er peo­ple saw the diary chat log in this pri­vate server.”

Gendron also live-streamed the shoot­ing ram­page and post­ed a 180-page man­i­festo online.

The Washington Post reviewed 672 pages of Discord mes­sages post­ed by some­one with the same han­dle used by Gendron on oth­er social media plat­forms. The mes­sages includ­ed self­ies of the suspect.

The paper also ver­i­fied a speed­ing tick­et that Gendron men­tioned he received. The user ref­er­enced Gendron’s men­tal health eval­u­a­tion last June, which was record­ed by New York State Police, accord­ing to reports.

The 18-year-old said in the mes­sages he lied when he told med­ical eval­u­a­tors his threat to com­mit a mur­der-sui­cide when he grad­u­at­ed high school was a joke. He believed the deci­sion allowed him to stay off the FBI’s radar.

“It was not a joke,” he said in the Discord mes­sages. “I wrote that down because that’s what I was plan­ning to do.”

On April 29, a copy of the first install­ment of the Gendron’s mes­sage was uploaded on the file-host­ing plat­form MediaFire. The Washington Post report­ed that it was not avail­able to down­load until Monday.

The sec­ond batch of mes­sages was post­ed on Thursday. MediaFire has removed the doc­u­ment and dis­abled the account. The platform’s chief exec­u­tive said the records would be kept for law enforcement.

“This is where I’m gonna end it, thanks for the fun,” the last mes­sage says.

The records on Discord go back as far as November, accord­ing to reports. They show that Gendron vowed in December to kill “replac­ers.”

He select­ed the Tops store in Buffalo by February after con­sid­er­ing attack­ing sites in Rochester. He also planned on tar­get­ing two oth­er spots in Buffalo.

According to reports, the assailant esti­mat­ed how many Black peo­ple he could kill between each loca­tion and worked out the dis­tance and how much time he would need for each shooting.

The mes­sages also revealed that the assailant con­sid­ered car­ry­ing on the ram­page at a Black school or church but changed his mind.

“I would con­sid­er break­ing into a Buffalo ele­men­tary school, but those places are locked up tight, plus I get a strange feel­ing when think­ing about mas­sacring chil­dren,” he wrote.

In addi­tion to those killed, three peo­ple were injured in the attack on Saturday before police offi­cers arrest­ed Gendron. Witnesses said he had tak­en off his tac­ti­cal gear and turned the gun to his neck before police took him down.

A por­tion of a live stream of the attack showed Gendron paus­ing after point­ing his assault rifle at a white man in the store to apol­o­gize, and walk­ing away. A longer ver­sion of the video showed Gendron had already shot about four or five peo­ple, shoot­ing one woman on the floor twice.

The white suprema­cist jour­naled three vis­its to the Tops store on March 8 where a secu­ri­ty guard con­front­ed him. He told the guard he was “col­lect­ing con­sen­sus data,” accord­ing to reports. In addi­tion to two secu­ri­ty guards, he count­ed 53 Black peo­ple in the super­mar­ket that day and six white people.

Gendron also feared that his par­ents would uncov­er his plan. He wrote about hid­ing his guns in his bed­room and clothes in his car. The sus­pect said he bought and sold sil­ver coins to acquire the ammu­ni­tion for the massacre. 

When Gendron’s par­ents saw a speed­ing tick­et from his recon­nais­sance vis­it to the store 200 miles away from his home, he told his father on March 26 that he skipped school to go on a hike at a state park, accord­ing to reports.

Gendron had secret­ly dropped out of com­mu­ni­ty col­lege, how­ev­er. Fearing that his par­ents could have caught on to his plan, Gendron wrote that he wished he had launched the attack right away

“My par­ents know lit­tle about me,” he wrote on Feb. 22. “They don’t know about the hun­dreds of sil­ver ounces I’ve had or the hun­dreds of dol­lars I’ve spent on ammo. They don’t know that I spent close to $1000 on ran­dom mil­i­tary s — . They don’t even know I own a shot­gun or an AR-15, or ille­gal magazines.”