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The Department of Justice on Wednesday filed federal hate crime charges against the white man suspected of fatally shooting 10 Black people at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, last month.
Federal prosecutors filed a criminal complaint against the suspect, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, on Wednesday in the Western District of New York. The charges include 10 counts of committing a hate crime resulting in death and three counts of committing a hate crime involving bodily injury and attempt to kill. He also faces multiple firearms charges stemming from attack.
“Gendron’s motive for the mass shooting was to prevent Black people from replacing white people and eliminating the white race, and to inspire others to commit similar attacks,” according to the complaint.
Earlier this month, a grand jury indicted the suspect on series of charges, including 25 counts of murder and one count of domestic terrorism motivated by hate. He has pleaded not guilty to those charges.
Local authorities said in the immediate aftermath of the shooting that the suspect was motivated by hate and deliberately targeted a store in a predominantly Black neighborhood.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said at the time, calling the shooting a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
Officials said the suspect researched the racial demographics in the community and conducted reconnaissance in the area a day in advance with the goal of killing as many Black people as possible. And his reported ties to racist beliefs widely held among conservative Americans tell a grim story of how right-wing media has fostered a culture of violence.
An online screed linked to the suspect reportedly included racist and antisemitic claims central to the “replacement” theory, a white nationalist conspiracy theory alleging a cabal of nonwhite people aim to replace the white population and change America for the worse. Those theories have been parroted frequently by conservative figures, including Fox News host Tucker Carlson.
Authorities have made clear for months the Buffalo shooter effectively saw himself as a soldier in a culture war, a point bolstered by reports the shooter livestreamed the massacre, resembling a war-like video game.
Wednesday’s hate crime charges are yet more evidence of the imminent danger white nationalists pose to all of our lives.