Buffalo shooting suspect pleads not guilty to 25 charges

By Brendan O’Brien

(Reuters) – The declared white supremacist accused of a racist attack that killed 10 people at a supermarket in a black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York, pleaded not guilty to 25 counts in an indictment on Thursday returned by a grand jury, according to court documents. .

The accused shooter, Payton Gendron, appeared in court for an arraignment hearing before Erie County Court Judge Susan Eagan, who ordered the 18-year-old held without bail, news outlets reported local. He is due back in court on July 7.

Gendron was targeting black people, authorities said, when he drove three hours from his home near Binghamton, New York, and shot 13 people with a semi-automatic assault rifle at a Tops store in Buffalo, killing 10 people on May 14. attack.

A grand jury returned a 25-count indictment Wednesday. The first charge – hate-motivated domestic terrorism – accuses Gendron of carrying out the attack “because of the perceived race and/or color of the person(s)” injured and killed. The charge carries a possible sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Gendron is the first defendant to face a charge based on New York’s domestic terrorism hate crimes law, Erie County Prosecutor John Flynn said at a news briefing after the Accused. The law was proposed after a mass shooting targeting Mexicans at a Walmart store in El Paso, Texas, and took effect on November 1, 2020.

Gendron also faces 10 counts of first-degree murder and 10 counts of second-degree murder, all hate crimes. The grand jury, which decides whether there is sufficient evidence to bring a defendant to justice, also returned three counts of attempted murder as hate crimes and a single count of illegal possession of a weapon.

“When you hear the phrase, throw the book at someone… Well, in this case, right here, the defendant just received ‘War and Peace,'” Flynn said, referring to the novel by 1,200 pages by Leo Tolstoy.

The weapons charge stems from the shooter modifying the rifle to carry a larger magazine, Flynn said.

Gendron’s lawyer told Reuters he respected the court’s order of silence and had no comment at this time.

The shooter posted real-time video of the attack on a social media platform after posting white supremacist material online showing he was inspired by previous racially motivated killings, authorities said.

The shooting, along with last week’s massacre at a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead, has reignited a long-running national debate over U.S. gun laws.

(Reporting by Brendan O’Brien in Chicago; Editing by Bill Berkrot)