Buffalo shooter let some people see the plans just before the attack

(AP) – Shortly before opening fire, the white gunman accused of killing 10 blacks at a supermarket in Buffalo, New York, allowed a small group of people to see his detailed plans for the attack, which he had been recording for months in a private online diary.

Discord, the chat platform where 18-year-old Payton Gendron wrote the diary, confirmed on Wednesday that an invitation to access his private writings had been sent to the group about half an hour earlier. Saturday’s attack on Tops Friendly Market, that you streamed live on another online service. Some of them accepted.

Gendron’s diary and racist and anti-Semitic entries dated last November included step-by-step descriptions of his raid plans, a detailed account of a reconnaissance trip he made to Buffalo in March and maps of the store he drew by hand. .

“What we know at this time is that the suspect created a private invite-only server to serve as a personal journal chat record,” a Discord spokesperson said in a written statement. “However, approximately 30 minutes before the attack, a small group of people were invited and joined the server. Prior to that, our records indicate that no other person viewed the diary chat log on this private server.”

It was unclear if any of the people who accessed Gendron’s diary or watched his live feed did anything to alert authorities or try to stop him. the attack. Discord said it removed Gendron’s diary as soon as the platform became aware of it, in accordance with the company’s policies against violent extremism.

Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said Monday that investigators were working to obtain, verify and review Gendron’s online posts.

Copies of his Discord journal, essentially a transcript of his posts in his private chat log, briefly surfaced elsewhere online after the shooting, along with a 180-page ruler attributed to him. Both were intertwined with white supremacist beliefs that echoed an unsubstantiated extremist conspiracy theory about a plot to diminish white influence.

President Joe Biden, who visited Buffalo on Tuesday, repudiated such beliefs, saying, “Now is the time for people of all races, of all backgrounds, to speak as a majority … and reject white supremacy.”

Gendron was indicted over the weekend on a murder charge; pleaded not guilty on his behalf and remains jailed on suicide watch. He is scheduled to appear in court in Buffalo again on Thursday.

Tech companies like Discord and Twitch, which authorities say Gendron used to livestream the supermarket attack, are under scrutiny for their role as vectors of hate speech.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul on Wednesday authorized State Attorney General Letitia James to investigate the social media platforms used by Gendron to determine whether they bear “civil or criminal liability for their role in promoting, facilitating, or provision of a platform to plan and promote violence”.

Discord said he planned to cooperate with the investigation of James and continues to assist law enforcement in the ongoing investigation into the shooting.

“Our deepest condolences go out to the victims and their families,” the company said. “Hate has no place on Discord and we are committed to combating violence and extremism.”

Messages seeking comment were left on Twitch. Twitch CEO Emmett Shear told the Harvard Business Review in an interview on Wednesday that the Amazon-owned platform would continue to “invest heavily to ensure everyone’s safety on Twitch.”

“I think this is an example of one of those places where we’ve done a lot of work, but obviously there’s still work to be done,” Shear said.

Attempts to contact representatives of two other technology platforms James is investigating, 8kun and 4chan, were unsuccessful. Gendron wrote in his journal that those boards were where he began reading about the racist ideologies that led him to kill people who were neither white nor Christian.

Reached for comment, Ron Watkins, the former admin of 8kun and its predecessor 8chan, said he resigned from the organization last year and has “no idea what’s going on with it.”

Gendron wrote in his Discord diary that he started reading 4chan a few months after the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and that he was heavily influenced by Brenton Tarrant, who killed 51 people in a shooting at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand. in 2019. Gendron wrote that he originally planned his attack for March 15, the third anniversary of the Tarrant attack.

Marc-André Argentino, a researcher at the London-based International Center for the Study of Radicalization and Political Violence, shared copies of Gendron’s diary entries with The Associated Press. He said it was possible but unlikely that the diary could have been altered by someone other than the author.

Gendron, in the newspaper, said he specifically targeted a store with a predominantly black clientele, researching locations in Rochester, Syracuse and Long Island before settling on Buffalo. Prosecutors say he appeared Saturday wearing a bulletproof vest and armed with an AR-15-style rifle as a helmet-mounted camera broadcast to the Internet.

Problems with his gun and then a bout of COVID-19, which he theorized he contracted from a fast-food chicken sandwich poisoned by government agents, prevented him from attacking earlier, he wrote in the diary.

Gendron wrote that he started thinking about “a personal attack on substitutes” a few weeks before an episode in a high school class about a year ago. That episode landed him in a hospital for a psychiatric evaluation.

A few weeks before the attack, Gendron wrote that neither his parents nor his siblings were aware of his plans, but he feared they would find out.

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Sisak reported from New York. Associated Press reporters Halleluya Hadero in New York, Michael Balsamo and Eric Tucker in Washington, DC, and Carolyn Thompson in Buffalo, New York, contributed to this report.

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Follow Michael Sisak on Twitter at twitter.com/mikesisak

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