The username on a livestream of the massacre ties him to racist conspiracy theories.
The New York teenager accused of killing 10 people at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday afternoon in a “straight-up racially motivated hate crime” appears to have spent months before the attack spewing racist conspiracy theories on social media sites., of Conklin, New York. They also confirmed that Gendron livestreamed some of the attack.
A person using the same social media handle as Gendron’s Twitch account shared racist and antisemitic comments on Reddit and Discord in the months before the attack. In addition, a hate-filled document that surfaced online soon after the assault was written under the name Payton Gendron and contained a vow to target Buffalo because of its large Black population.
Law enforcement sources have told The Daily Beast that they are investigating a possible manifesto, but the document could not be authenticated in the hours after the massacre. It’s not clear if the version that was circulating online could have been altered by someone. The shooter thus appears to have followed in the footsteps of notorious white supremacist gunmen like those in the 2019 massacres in El Paso, Texas; Poway, California; and the 2018 attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue.