Man rushes Buffalo shooter during emotional sentencing hearing

NEW YORK - A man in court lunged on Wednesday at

the shooter who murdered 10 Black people during a live-streamed supermarket rampage

in New York state last year, disrupting the sentencing hearing for the self-declared white supremacist.

Payton Gendron, 19, was escorted out of the courtroom after someone in the audience rushed at him and was restrained by security guards during emotional statements by relatives of victims.

The hearing was paused for several minutes before resuming.

Gendron was subsequently sentenced to life in prison.

Earlier, Ms Simone Crawley, the granddaughter of 86-year-old Ruth Whitfield, called Gendron “a cowardly racist.”

Mrs Kimberly Salter, the widow of security guard Aaron Salter, explained why her family were wearing red and black.

“Red for the blood that he shed for his family and for his community, and black because we are still grieving,” she said.

Gendron had pleaded guilty in November to a state charge of domestic terrorism motivated by hate over the massacre in Buffalo in May, which carries a mandatory penalty of life in prison without parole.

He planned the attack for months, targeting Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo because of the large African-American population in the surrounding neighbourhood.

On May 14, the then-18-year-old drove from his hometown of Conklin, more than 300km away, with the intention of killing as many Black people as possible, prosecutors said.

Wearing heavy body armour and wielding an AR-15 assault rifle, Gendron shot four people in the store’s parking lot, three of them fatally, before entering the grocery store.

Among those killed inside was a retired police officer working as a security guard. He fired several shots at the assailant before being shot and killed himself, police said.

Gendron wore a helmet with a video camera attached and live-streamed the two-minute attack on the platform Twitch.

The victims ranged in age from 32 to 86. Eleven of the 13 people shot were Black and two were white.

Police arrested Gendron within hours of the attack and investigators found a 180-page document on his computer that laid out his racist motivations for the massacre.

Gendron admitted all the charges against him in November, including 10 counts of murder in the first degree, three attempted murder charges and one count of criminal possession of a weapon.

He was the first person in New York to be convicted of the state’s domestic terrorism charge, which was introduced in 2020. AFP