Sean Kirst: In heart of Buffalo, after lethal madness, young 'brotherhood' shares tears, anger and hope

He made a morning stop at Famous Doughnuts for a couple of glazed twists, joined some buddies at a Bennett High School session of the Breaking Barriers Youth Leadership Council, “threw up some shots” on the McCarthy Park courts and finally, on his way home, noticed two or three young kids selling bottles of water on Suffolk Street.

He gave them a few dollars, loving the karma – they were younger versions of himself – before walking through the front door in midafternoon. The television was on when his mother turned to him, with an anxious solemnity he will remember for the rest of his life.

There had been a shooting at Tops.

The store is nearby, part of the bedrock of their lives. They would soon learn 10 people had died in what investigators describe as mass murder fueled by racial hate, carried out by a white 18-year-old accused of traveling hundreds of miles expressly to kill Black Americans.

Monday night, in a Zoom meeting with dozens of others from Breaking Barriers, Eutsey, 22, searched for words about navigating the aftermath.

“For someone to have that much hatred for someone they don’t even know?” he said. “And then to carry it through like that?”

His shoulders heaved. He began to weep.

Eutsey is typically lighthearted, even joyous, with no cushion against this sorrow. His friends offered quiet words of support, and the session turned into what Tommy McClam, 64, hoped it would be:

“Too often you can walk around with a hard shell when inside you feel like you’re disintegrating,” said McClam, who with Daniel Robertson coordinates Breaking Barriers – a program for young men of color inspired by the Greater Buffalo Racial Equity Roundtable, organized within Say Yes Buffalo, supported by the Oishei Foundation and part of the national Brother’s Keepers Alliance.

Through gatherings and opportunities that ignite a sense of fellowship, more than 400 participants in the last four years have locked into a mission they define with two words: brotherhood and legacy, as both inspiration and a collective shield against despair.

Xavier Lamar, 18, who will focus on urban studies in the fall at the University of Albany, said the goal is simple: “We want to change community narratives about young men of color.”

McClam and Robertson immediately knew they all would need each other after what happened at Tops, lethal violence based on poisonous racist myths that their program is built to confront and cast away.

The Zoom call was an initial step, a “safe space” where members could shed tears or vent anger and fear. Afterward, through McClam, I spoke individually to the members quoted here, all of whom approved of using their names.

At 16, Jordan Bonner – one of the younger participants – cannot shake the idea that a stranger came to Buffalo simply to kill people who look like him. “It made me scared to go places,” he said, “even just going to the store.”

Many had direct connections to the lost. Lamar recalled how Pearl Young, a grandmother and Sunday school teacher who died in the attack, used to comfort him at church when he was a little guy worried about leaving his mother’s side.

Lamar was returning from a track meet that afternoon when his mom warned by text of the bloodshed. He still cannot process the idea of a racist killer entering a place where Lamar routinely went for beef jerky or chocolate milk after track practice.

Buffalo, Lamar said, is a city of “strong people who can come back,” but any healing cries out for a hard collective step: “We need transparency about racism, about white supremacists, or they will keep killing our people.”

Malik Stubbs, a graduate student at Medaille, told his friends how his mother, Anna Smith, planned to go to Tops – but instead put it off while she watched the end of a movie. Smith is familiar with the rhythm of the store. She was a longtime friend of Deacon Heyward Patterson, a jitney driver who often drove her home after shopping, saving her from a long walk with heavy groceries.

“He was a big blessing to my family,” said Stubbs, describing Patterson as a familiar neighbor “who loved everyone and would do anything for anyone.” Stubbs spent a couple of days trying to sift through how such a guy could die in such a way before the program did exactly what it is built to do:

By Zoom, young men who all too often used to feel they faced the world alone turned to “the brotherhood” of Breaking Barriers.

Deonte’ Brown told his buddies he was at his grandmother’s house, back in Buffalo for less than a week from his studies at Howard University, when he learned of mass murder in his neighborhood.

“The way it happened, the way we got killed in there, it was like we weren’t even human,” Brown said. The Zoom call was the beginning of what he sees as the only possible antidote: “It’s just so important for all of us to just look at each other with love, to look each other in the eye, to remind each other of who we are.

“I just want the world to remember it, that we’re human,” Brown said. “I feel like this hate is so real and we lost so much, and then the media from around the world come in and almost see our community pain, our grief, as a show, as entertainment, and that it’ll be two weeks here for them and on to the next thing.”

He paused, silent, and you heard him draw in his breath.

As for the idea of a galvanized, awakened Buffalo, a city and region roused by trauma into taking on generations of crushing disparity, Brown said the proof will be in whether this spontaneous Niagara of civic love flows from strength, commitment and real empathy that will endure in the larger community once the shock wears off.

For some on the call – expressing what is true for thousands of others in Buffalo – the worst challenge is trying to clear the unbearable from their minds. The accused killer carried a camera during the attack, and several young men who saw the video wish they could "unwatch" it.

“That stuff doesn’t get out of your head,” said Stubbs, 27, nicknamed “Big Bro” as a relative elder in the group.

While he is moved by the sweeping regional response, it has become impossible for him to think of Tops without envisioning what happened there, a reality he called “heartbreaking” because so many love the place.

“I have pride in that grocery store and what it means to the community,” Stubbs said, joining Dorian Withrow – an author and podcaster who at 22 just graduated from Canisius College – in asking why other supermarkets are almost nonexistent within the “food desert” of the city's predominately Black neighborhoods.

The other cannot-wait-imperative, Withrow said, “is advocating for better security in places like stores and churches” – a concern that says everything about where we are, in 2022.

The members said little as the call began, emotion of such intensity they did not quite know where to start. McClam and Robertson offered a few introductory questions, then stepped back and listened as the walls fell away. Long ago, through sheer ongoing presence, the two men earned lasting trust: As Bonner said, their commitment feels like family.

Just before the conversation ended, McClam asked the group to start thinking about a Breaking Barriers project as testament to what must happen next, a statement on the kind of Buffalo that in itself would be the greatest true memorial.

“We want to do something that will honor those who died by finding light, a way of facing death and birthing life,” McClam said of a task understood by these young men he loves.

Monday, in solidarity, their first step was by Zoom.