US Buffalo shooter planned attack for months
According to social media posts linked to the suspect, the white adolescent has planned the shooting for months and scouted out the spot ahead of time.
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People praying at the site of the shooting in Buffalo New York, US (AP)
According to social media posts linked to the suspect, Payton Gendron, the 18-year-old who shot 13 people at a New York grocery store planned the shooting for months and scouted out the store beforehand.
Payton Gendron, 18, went to Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo three times on March 8 and wrote afterward about his desire to murder, according to posts he is thought to have made on Discord and 4chan, both popular with radicals.
A groundbreaking fact about the shooting is that it was carried out by a neo-Nazi white supremacist, who had published a fascist manifesto using the "black sun" Nazi symbol. The insignia is used by the Ukrainian neo-Nazi Azov Battalion.
Read more: A gun is worth a thousand Nazi words
According to CNN and The Washington Post, he wrote about how many Black and white shoppers were inside and drew out the supermarket's aisles.
During his third trip, Gendron said he was stopped by a "Black armed security guard" who asked him what he was doing going in and out of the business.
He then made up an excuse about gathering census information. "In hindsight that was a close call," Gendron wrote.
According to CNN, Gendron wrote a post on March 10 in which he said he was "going to have to kill that security guard at Tops. I hope he doesn't kill me or even hurt me instantly."
A former police officer acting as a security guard was among those killed in Saturday's attack. According to authorities, he fired numerous bullets at the intruder before being wounded himself.
According to the Post, which studied more than 600 pages of online chats, Gendron initially wrote about killing Black people in December and chose in February to target Tops because of its big surrounding African American community.
According to CNN, Gendron stated that he picked Buffalo as the favored place for his attack because its zip code had a bigger Black population than other locations he was considering.
He allegedly wrote about how he planned to launch his attack on March 15 but had to postpone it multiple times.
