Gunman considered targets in Syracuse, Rochester and across Buffalo before concluding Tops was 'best option'

The gunman spent nearly five months researching the demographics of upstate neighborhoods and strategizing the best places to kill Black people, according to more than 600 pages of online messages reviewed by The Buffalo News. As late as Feb. 12, three months after he resolved to commit and livestream a mass murder, the messages claim the accused attacker, Payton Gendron, still planned to target one of four or five locations in Rochester. 

Having watched a YouTube video on “the worst parts of Buffalo,” however, and researched Buffalo neighborhoods on real estate and crime sites and Google Maps, the gunman switched his focus to the city’s East Side, according to the messages.

On March 8, he claimed to have visited the Tops on Jefferson Avenue, as well as a nearby dollar store and barbershop, to count the number of Black and white patrons at each location. Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia confirmed Monday that the shooter made a visit to Buffalo in March, following a Washington Post report on the compiled messages.

The messages, which appear to have been copied into a text document from a private chat group on the messaging site Discord, were published to a file-sharing site in two batches in the weeks before the May 14 attack. The documents includes pictures of Gendron, his vehicle and the weapon used on Saturday, as well as details about his personal life – such as his placement in a high school chemistry competition – that The News independently verified.

In addition to detailing the gunman’s planning process, the document explains how he funded the purchase of hundreds of dollars of weapons, ammunition and body armor and how he hid his plans from his parents, even as he modified rifles in his childhood bedroom and blew off class to rehearse the attack.

It also answers a question that has haunted the community since news of the shooting broke: How did he choose Buffalo, of all places?

“New plan,” Gendron wrote in a Feb. 17 post. “14208 buffalo has ~10% higher black population, that is the place I will go.”

The compiled messages describe Gendron’s research into several upstate locations over a period of months, beginning in early December 2021. A self-declared admirer of several white supremacist killers, and an adherent to the baseless theory that people of color are “replacing” the white population, the gunman initially planned to stage his attack on March 15, the messages say, to coincide with the third anniversary of the Christchurch shooting.

From the beginning, his criteria for targets were clear: busy, public locations frequented by Black people – and unlikely to see many white visitors. According to the two documents, Gendron initially considered attacking a location in Binghamton, the nearest urban area to his home in Conklin, N.Y., but moved on to Syracuse and Rochester after discovering the city has a relatively small Black population.

In mid-February, however – months after he began planning the attack, and weeks after he began purchasing the body armor and other supplies to carry it out – the messages begin to mention Buffalo as a potential target, noting that the city’s Black population is more concentrated than Rochester’s. The messages also quote crime statistics for East Side neighborhoods and ZIP codes, pulled from the websites AreaVibes and Spotcrime.com. At several points, Gendron expressed interest in targeting a Black neighborhood with high crime rates, a reference to racist conspiracy theories about Black communities and violence.

“I was stuck on Rochester for too long,” Gendron wrote on Feb. 17, before listing more than a dozen Buffalo churches, schools and businesses in the Broadway-Fillmore, Cold Spring and Kingsley neighborhoods, including the Broadway Market and Canisius College.

“Check out Emslie Buffalo,” he added on March 1, alongside the link to a YouTube video titled “I drove through the WORST parts of Buffalo, New York. This is what I saw.” The creator of the video, who uses a series of racist tropes to introduce several East Side neighborhoods, did not immediately respond to a request for comment.

It’s unclear from the messages how seriously Gendron considered any of the named targets besides Tops. The documents also do not specify if he visited any locations other than Tops, a Family Dollar store in the same plaza and a barbershop on Delavan Avenue. Experts in domestic extremism recommend caution in interpreting these types of documents, which can serve as a form of myth-making in white supremacist circles. Unlike prior leaks from private white supremacist chat rooms, Gendron always intended to publish these messages, he wrote, and included details meant to upset people and prompt specific types of coverage from the media.

On Sunday, however, Buffalo police said they had evidence to suggest that Gendron planned to attack a second location and on Monday confirmed reports that Gendron traveled to Buffalo on March 8 for what the messages describe as a reconnaissance mission. According to the documents, a Tops security guard confronted Gendron on that trip, asking why he kept entering and leaving the supermarket.

Gendron, who claimed he lied to the security guard, later wrote that he visited to draw maps of its interior and tally the number of Black and white shoppers at the store.

Between two visits that day, he counted roughly 115 Black shoppers and 13 white ones, according to the posts.

“There isn’t another place” where so many unarmed Black residents congregated in one area, he wrote.