The white shooter who killed 10 Black customers and employees at a supermarket in Buffalo admitted guilty on Monday to murder and acts of terrorism motivated by hatred, ensuring that he will serve the rest of his life in jail.
Payton Gendron, 19, entered the plea on Monday in a courthouse about two miles from the supermarket where he had carried out a racist attack with a semiautomatic weapon and body armor to maintain white supremacy in the country.
He entered a guilty plea to every charge in the grand jury indictment, including murder, murder committed out of hatred, and domestic terrorism, which carries a mandatory life sentence without the possibility of release.
Additionally, Gendron admitted to inflicting injuries on three incident survivors in May.
The appeal is being made at a time when many Americans seem almost immune to horrific shootings.
Recently, there have been fatal attacks at a Virginia Walmart, a Colorado gay bar, and the University of Virginia.
A shooter in Uvalde, Texas, massacred 19 students and two teachers at a school just days after Gendron’s shooting rampage in Buffalo.
In the past, Gendron entered a not-guilty plea to two federal hate crime accusations; if found guilty, he could get the death penalty.
The American Justice Department has not indicated whether it will pursue the death penalty.
In his assault on Buffalo’s Tops Friendly Market, Gendron utilized an AR-15-style rifle that was legally acquired. He shot store staff and customers livestreaming from a helmet camera while wearing body armor.
The victims ranged in age from 32 to 86, including a church deacon, a mother of a former Buffalo fire commissioner, and an armed security officer who died while attempting to protect customers.
Gendron has white supremacy as his goal.
In documents published online shortly before the attack, he claimed that he had chosen the store, roughly a three-hour drive from his home in Conklin, New York because it was in a community with a high concentration of Black people.
He claimed his motivation was his conviction that white people in the United States were being “replaced” by people of color as part of a vast conspiracy.
After being challenged by police as he left the store, Gendron turned himself up.
Since then, family members of the victims have urged Congress to pass legislation to address racial supremacy and gun violence.
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