How will we memorialize the Buffalo 10?

In Boulder, Colorado, where a gunman killed 10 people at a supermarket in March 2021, the store reopened almost a year later with a remembrance tree garden in a corner of the parking lot.

After the attack at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., playgrounds for each of the 26 victims in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut were erected.

What will Buffalo do to memorialize the May 14 massacre at the Tops Markets on Jefferson Avenue and the 10 lives that were lost?

"These were 10 precious lives," said Mayor Byron Brown, "and we can't allow a terrible act of hate to steal the memories of these beautiful lives."

Brown said in the next few days, he and Gov. Kathy Hochul will announce plans for a large memorial that would pay tribute to the Buffalo 10 – Celestine Chaney, Roberta Drury, Andre Mackniel, Katherine "Kat" Massey, Margus Morrison, Heyward Patterson, Aaron Salter Jr., Geraldine Talley, Ruth Whitfield and Pearl Young.

Right now, spontaneously created memorials line the chain link fence surrounding the Tops Markets parking lot and all around the neighborhood on Jefferson Avenue. Portraits of each of the victims and a row of white doves with their names on it are at one corner. There are mounds of flowers, balloons, candles and flags next to utility poles still wrapped with crime scene tape from that terrible day.

Cassandra Hernandez, an El Paso councilwoman, said a giant makeshift memorial sprung up next to the Walmart in the days and weeks after the mass shooting there. The city eventually dismantled it, but kept some items, which were moved to a small memorial at a local park. 

“It became a really holy site that we couldn’t touch. What we did is work with local rotary clubs to preserve what we could and create an exhibit that would be permanent,” she said. “It’s a place of grieving and a place to reflect on the response from the community and the love.”

Walmart later put up the Grand Candela. And a healing garden was started at a prominent park in the city. An artist’s monument to be placed in close proximity to the shooting is still in the works.

In Boulder, the Buffalo massacre brought an overwhelming wave of sadness to Mayor Aaron Brockett when he heard the news that yet “another horrific mass shooting” had occurred in the United States.

It brought back memories of the grief Brockett felt just over a year ago and still feels over what his own city went through over a mass shooting at a grocery store. Ten people were killed March 22, 2021 at the King Soopers, when a 21-year-old man opened fire inside the store.

“A neighborhood supermarket should be a place of comfort and daily life, not become a scene of terror,” Brockett said. “It’s just such a horrible thing.”

Ten trees were planted for the victims of the memorial garden.

“People coming together afterward has been so powerful,” Brockett said. “They found solace in community. That’s what has made the most difference.”

After a tragic event, people seek out a way to connect and mourn to those spaces, said Paul Farber, director and co-founder of Monument Lab, a Philadelphia nonprofit public art and history studio.

"We're talking about an outpouring of grief and loss," Farber said. "In places of tragedy, one of the things you often see is immediate attention to that space as a shrine, an altar."

Monuments to traumatic events can be found around the country, from George Floyd square in Minneapolis to the reflecting pools at the site of the Twin Towers that were destroyed in the Sept. 11 attacks.

"Sadly, there are so many places. When I think about it in the long arc of things, the country is illuminated with sites of grief," he said.

Buffalo already has its share. Perhaps its most famous is the white obelisk in Niagara Square commemorating the assassination of President William McKinley at the Pan-American Exhibition in Buffalo in 1901.

Another may be the series of memorials to the lives lost in the Feb. 12, 2009 crash of Continental Flight 3407.

Karen Wielinski was in the family room in the back of her house on Long Street in Clarence Center when the plane came crashing down, reducing the house to burning rubble. Wielinski was buried in debris, but managed to get out. So did her daughter, Jill. But her husband, Doug, did not. He and the 50 people aboard the plane were killed.

Following the crash, there was a strong desire to find a way to memorialize the event and the victims, she recounted. Wielinski was part of a group that formed to do just that. 

"It took a lot of time," she said, "and, at times, it wasn't easy."

In the end, the group, Flight 3407 Foundation, came up with several different memorials, and more are planned.

"It's important to have a diverse group that includes everyone touched by the tragedy," she said. For Flight 3407, that included families of the victims, residents on Long Street, a town justice and Wielinski.

They solicited ideas from the public and worked with an architect and eventually came up with several tributes.

"It doesn't have to be one big thing," she said the group came to learn.

Now, at the former site of the Wielinski home, 51 paving stones create the shape of an airplane wing in the grass. Six pear trees are on either side to represent 12 – the day of the month of the crash – with another tree planted in the middle to represent the heart of the Wielinski home. There are indentations in the ground that create the shape of the house that once stood there.

"I can walk down and say this was my dining room, this was my living room," she said. "It shows: There was a house here."

There's also a kiosk at the Clarence Town Library that tells the story of the crash and the lives that were lost. A fountain that was already outside the library was transformed into a memorial. The names of the victims are on stones that encircle the fountain.

In the near future, the group is planning to put up a plaque at the Long Street site that explains the crash.

Long Street doesn't draw crowds anymore, Wielinski said. She herself moved to East Aurora.

"That's how life is," she said.

She hopes that the tragedy that took her husband will never be forgotten, but that she also knows that it is important for people learn from what happened and move forward together.

"Buffalo strong, right?" she said.