Family Members of Buffalo Mass Shooting Want Focus on Preventing Racial Violence, Not Death Penalty

As fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors con­sid­er what pun­ish­ment to seek against the accused gun­man in the May 2022 mass shoot­ing at a Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, sur­vivors and fam­i­ly mem­bers of vic­tims of the shoot­ing are con­cerned that pur­su­ing the death penal­ty will fur­ther spread the racial hatred that fueled the mas­sacre and divert atten­tion from mean­ing­ful action to com­bat white supremacist violence.

In inter­views with ABC News aired September 1, 2022, Wayne Jones (pic­tured) and Garnell Whitfield Jr., whose moth­ers were two of the ten African Americans killed in the ram­page, and store work­er Fragrance Harris Stanfield, who sur­vived the shoot­ing, ques­tioned the appro­pri­ate­ness of the death penal­ty in the case.

“If you kill him, he becomes a mar­tyr,” Jones said, inspir­ing oth­ers rad­i­cal­ized by online con­spir­a­cy the­o­ries and racist polit­i­cal rhetoric to repli­cate his acts. 

Punishing the shoot­er isn’t the issue, Whitfield said. The issue is com­bat­ting white suprema­cy. “[T]his ain’t about that guy,” he said. ​“I’m focused on the things that empow­ered him and the rea­son he became who he was. The sys­tems and the peo­ple that con­tin­ue to be in pow­er to this day that con­tin­ue to make vic­tims of us all.”

Federal pros­e­cu­tors allege that the accused 19-year-old shoot­er, Payton Gendron, who kept a detailed 700-page on-line diary of his plans, was moti­vat­ed by a right-wing racist con­spir­a­cy the­o­ry that forces in the U.S. were attempt­ing to replace white cit­i­zens with peo­ple of col­or and want­ed to ​“inspire oth­ers to com­mit sim­i­lar attacks.” ABC report­ed that a Joint Intelligence Bulletin obtained from fed­er­al coun­tert­er­ror­ism author­i­ties raised fears that the con­tents of Gendron’s diary, if pub­licly released, ​“out­lin­ing [his] tac­tics, tech­niques and pro­ce­dures … will like­ly enhance the capa­bil­i­ties of poten­tial mass casu­al­ty shoot­ers who may be inspired by this attack.”

Whitfield, a for­mer Buffalo fire com­mis­sion­er, said it is time for the coun­try to seri­ous­ly address the rise in white suprema­cy. However, he rec­og­nizes the reluc­tance of white Americans to engage in such a dis­cus­sion. ​“You would have to acknowl­edge that your ances­tors enslaved my ances­tors and built this coun­try on our backs. … You would have to acknowl­edge the lies that you’ve been taught. And you’d have to acknowl­edge the faults of your ances­tors, of your belief sys­tem. You would have to come to grips with all that. And that’s uncomfortable.”

The Buffalo shoot­ing is one of the most vis­i­ble of the ris­ing num­ber of hate crimes com­mit­ted against African Americans across the United States. FBI data indi­cate that such hate crimes rose by 46% between 2019 and 2020. 

Whitfield described Gendron as ​“an insignif­i­cant pawn being used by the pow­ers that be. … I don’t care if he gets the death penal­ty or not. I don’t real­ly care about him,” he said. ​“He’s a vic­tim, too,” Whitfied said. ​“He’s just too stu­pid and igno­rant to know it.”

Jones said, ​“When you see him in court, he’s a child. You can tell he’s a child and, whether he tells any­body or not, you can see it in his face: ​‘I messed up bad­ly.’ So, for me, I would rather for him to just stay behind bars for the rest of his life.” 

“I know some peo­ple want the death penal­ty for him,” Jones said. ​“But I’ve got kids. I’ve had 18-year-old kids and you make a lot of mis­takes when you’re younger. He made a big one. But he doesn’t come across to me as a hard-core ter­ror­ist. … Somebody brain­washed him into this, or talked him into doing it, gave him the idea and kept feed­ing him that the Blacks are tak­ing over,” he said.

Harris Stanfield was work­ing at the store when the shoot­ing occurred and pressed fed­er­al pros­e­cu­tors to include charges relat­ing to the vic­tims who were not killed or phys­i­cal­ly injured dur­ing the shoot­ing. Those peo­ple, she said, expe­ri­enced ​“a total­ly dif­fer­ent set of trau­ma” that need­ed to be rec­og­nized. But in terms of pun­ish­ment, she said, “[o]bviously, he should not be released. Whether he gets the death penal­ty or not, that is not one thing that I would think about. I’m not into death like that. I don’t wish death on any­one. For any rea­son,” she said.