Payton Gendron – Erie County District Attorney/AFP
The white supremacist teenager accused of killing 10 African Americans in a racist attack at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, appeared in court on Thursday, which ordered his preventive detention during the investigation.
Payton Gendron, 18, dressed in the orange uniform of American prisoners and a mask, stood silently in front of Judge Craig Hannah of the Buffalo Courthouse.
“Defendant remains in custody,” Erie County District Attorney John Flynn announced in a statement. The next hearing will take place on June 9.
Several family members of the suspect were in the room, according to journalists from the local press.
One person in the audience shouted “Payton, you are a coward!” as he leaves in handcuffs, he shows a video posted on the website of local news channel WGRZ.
Gendron is accused of killing 10 people and wounding three others during a shooting at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, in one of the worst racist massacres in recent US history, eroded, according to President Joe Biden, by supremacist “poison”.
Wearing a bulletproof vest, helmet and armed with an AR-15 rifle, the young man, who in a 180-page manifesto posted on social media declares himself “fascist”, “racist” and “anti-Semitic”, broadcast live the attack that would have prepared carefully for months.
He chose Tops supermarket because it is located in a mostly black neighborhood.
Gendron has pleaded not guilty to the charge of first-degree murder. The authorities are considering the possibility of also accusing him of a hate crime and terrorism.
During his visit to Buffalo to comfort the victims’ families, Biden described the massacre that shocked the country as “domestic terrorism” and once again called on Congress to regulate the free movement of firearms. on the streets of the country. The president has always faced Republican opposition to any regulation.
So far this year, the organization Gun Violence Archive has recorded more than 200 “mass shootings” in the country, where guns caused nearly 20,000 deaths in 2021.
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