Suspect in New York shooting was detained for mental health check last year

BUFFALO, NEW YORK (REUTERS) - A white teenager who fatally shot 10 people in a racist attack at a New York grocery store in a black neighbourhood had been taken into custody and given a mental health evaluation a year ago, but was released after roughly a day, the authorities said on Sunday (May 15).

The suspect, Payton Gendron, 18, surrendered to police on Saturday at the Buffalo, New York, grocery store after what the authorities called an act of "racially motivated violent extremism".

He had apparently publicised a racist manifesto on the Internet.

"The evidence that we have uncovered so far makes no mistake this is an absolute racist hate crime that will be prosecuted as a hate crime," Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told reporters on Sunday.

Eleven people struck by gunfire were black and two were white, officials said.

The racial breakdown of the dead was not made clear. Mr Gramaglia told reporters that Gendron had been taken into custody and given a mental evaluation over 1½ days last June but was released.

While he did not provide additional details, New York State police said in a statement on Sunday that they had been called to a high school in Gendron's home town of Conklin, New York, near the Pennsylvania border, on June 8, 2021, in response to a 17-year-old student making a threatening statement.

Without identifying Gendron, police said the student was taken into custody and given a mental health evaluation at a hospital. He was not charged criminally.

New York Governor Kathy Hochul told ABC News on Sunday that an investigation would focus on what could have been done to stop Gendron, since he had advertised his views online and had been on the authorities' radar.

"I want to know what people knew and when they knew it," she said.

The Buffalo shooting follows other racially motivated mass murders in recent years, including a Pittsburgh synagogue attack that left 11 dead in October 2018, and the Atlanta spa shootings in March 2021 in which a white man killed eight people, targeting Asians.

The authorities said Gendron drove to Buffalo from his home several hours away to launch the attack, which he broadcast in real time on social media platform Twitch, a live video service owned by Amazon.com. He then opened fire at the Tops grocery store using a gun that he legally purchased but had illegally modified a high-capacity magazine, Ms Hochul said.

On Sunday, several dozen community members held an emotional vigil for the victims outside the store, where Ms Sharon Doyle, a 55-year-old security guard with Erie County Public Library, led a chant of "black lives matter, my life matters".

"We all go in this Tops. I was scared to even go to Walmart last night," Ms Doyle said. "I have to go to work tomorrow and I'm terrified."

Gendron was arraigned hours after the shooting in state court on first-degree murder charges, which carry a maximum penalty of life in prison without parole, said Erie County District Attorney John Flynn.

Gendron entered a plea of not guilty and is scheduled to return to court on May 19. He was on suicide watch and isolated from other incarcerated individuals on Sunday, Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said.

Mr Stephen Belongia, the Federal Bureau of Investigation special agent in charge of the bureau's Buffalo field office, said the attack would be investigated both as a hate crime and as an act of "racially motivated violent extremism" under federal law.

US President Joe Biden decried the shooting as "abhorrent to the very fabric of this nation" in a statement on Saturday.