'My parents know something’s wrong': But accused Tops killer lied to fool them

On Feb. 20, Pamela picked up and laundered the liner of her son’s combat helmet, according to more than 600 pages of online messages reviewed by The Buffalo News.

On March 5, the messages say, Paul failed to notice that his son used his computer to upgrade his cellphone plan so that he could livestream his attack on an East Side Tops location.

On March 29, both parents confronted Payton Gendron about his behavior over the prior week, during which he said he had stabbed, beaten and decapitated a feral cat and received a ticket in the mail for speeding on his way to surveil the Jefferson Avenue supermarket.

“I lied nearly the entire time,” Gendron wrote that afternoon. “I said I was doing fine in school and going to every class when I haven't been in a class for weeks now. It's gonna make me quite upset when they realize the truth about what I've actually been doing the last few months.”

The messages, which Gendron began in November 2021 and which he intended for publication, describe a distant and occasionally adversarial relationship between the accused gunman and his civil engineer parents. For a period of months, the 18-year-old wrote, he repeatedly lied, hid and dissembled to keep secret his plan to conduct mass murder – even as he ordered hundreds of dollars of body armor to their house, modified an assault rifle in his childhood bedroom and grew increasingly anxious that his behavior had aroused their suspicions.

Gendron's parents did not know he owned a shotgun, an AR-15 or illegal magazines, he wrote, and neither realized their son was a white supremacist nor appeared to share his views.  

Many of the claims about the gunman’s family are impossible to verify without the testimony of the Gendrons themselves. Neither parent, nor several close relations, responded to calls from The Buffalo News. 

Law enforcement agencies and others have, however, already confirmed several events that played roles in the relationship between the suspect and his parents, including his early withdrawal from SUNY Broome and a March 8 speeding ticket. Like previous young, far-right extremists, Gendron appears to have published his writings with an eye toward manipulating the narrative around the attack and upsetting or distracting readers of both his racist screed and the 672 pages of messages.

'My parents know little about me' 

From a distance, at least, there were few public signs of the violence brewing in the Gendron home. Photographs posted on the couple’s Facebook, Instagram and Twitter pages, some now removed, show a smiling family of five – Paul, Pamela and three sons – vacationing in Myrtle Beach and posing in matching red-and-black plaid pajamas. A Pinterest page belonging to Pamela, last updated four years ago, includes collections on family vacations, camping, home decorating and religious quotes.

Complete coverage: 10 killed, 3 wounded in mass shooting at Buffalo supermarket

Friends and relatives of the family told the New York Post this week that they were “close-knit,” “God-fearing,” “well-to-do” people. A friend of the gunman told The Daily Mail his parents did not allow violent video games in their home. 

“When I first heard that this happened … I actually had a different picture in my mind of who the family was – some family living in a trailer park someplace in the outskirts, the family with their AR-15s,” Jerry Kozlowski, a friend of the Gendrons, told the Post.

“You try your best as a parent. Something went wrong,” he added.

Both Paul and Pamela Gendron work as civil engineers with the state Department of Transportation, a DOT spokesman confirmed, based in the DOT’s Region 9 offices in Binghamton. The couple made a combined salary of $183,400 in 2020, according to state payroll records maintained by the Empire Center.

Paul, 51, was active in the Public Employees Federation as chairman of labor management issues for unionized transportation workers and as a PEF Council leader and executive board member, PEF President Wayne Spence said in a statement. A native of New Jersey, he attended Rutgers University and began work at the DOT within years of graduation, according to public records and testimony he delivered to the New York State Assembly in 2017 regarding the state transportation budget

Public records show Gendron’s mother, Pamela, 53, has lived near Binghamton since at least the late 1980s and worked for the DOT for at least 15 years. The couple purchased their current home in Conklin – a gray-sided, four-bedroom house with a neat lawn, a pool and a gingham-print flag over the porch – for $116,000 in 2002, just over a year before having Payton.

In online messages, however, Payton characterizes his relationship with his parents as distant and strained, an estrangement he said he exploited to deceive them. As a child, he felt he didn’t have “that much importance” to his family, he wrote, and that he worried his grades would disappoint and anger his parents. 

“My parents know little about me,” he added. “They don’t know about the hundreds of silver ounces I’ve had, or the hundreds of dollars I’ve spent on ammo. They don’t know that I spent close to $1000 on random military [stuff]. They don’t even know I own a shotgun or an AR-15, or illegal magazines.”

The messages suggest Gendron’s parents were also unaware he had become a self-described white supremacist: On March 11, when the family visited a Spectrum Mobile store to upgrade their phones’ data plans, the accused gunman wrote that he felt “very stressed” his parents or the store tech would discover the racist photos and messages stored on his phone.

Nothing in the Gendrons’ social media profiles suggests they shared their son’s views. On Instagram and Twitter, Pamela – a registered Republican – followed family members, celebrities and mainstream news outlets, including the Dalai Lama, the New York Times and former President Barack Obama. Paul, a registered Democrat, followed dozens of reporters, baseball commentators and Biden administration officials, including a cabinet secretary who made headlines last year after testifying that white supremacist terror represented the country’s top security concern.

“My parents know something’s wrong” 

The Gendrons did appear to know, however, that their son was troubled – and that he owned guns, the attacker wrote. In June of 2021, New York State police visited the Gendron home after Payton made a comment about committing a “murder/suicide” during a remote high school class.

Eight months later, on March 25, Gendron claimed to brutally kill – over the course of more than an hour – a feral cat that had attacked his cat Paige, finally decapitating and photographing the animal’s dead body. “I called my mom and she gave me a box and I dug a shallow grave in the backyard,” he wrote, before posting a picture of himself wearing safety goggles and speckled with what appears to be blood.

The News could not independently verify the image, which – like other photographs in the 600-page document – does not contain digital capture data. Pictures of tortured animals are a regular trope on 4chan, an online message board that Gendron said he frequented.

Gendron claims that he was introduced to guns through the Boy Scouts and through his uncle and cousins, who sometimes took him shooting. Paul Gendron bought his son a Savage Axis hunting rifle when he was 16 years old, according to the messages, and took him shooting in Skyline Drive State Forest near Kirkwood, where he later rehearsed his attack. At points, he had thought about using the Savage Axis to commit suicide, but decided “that would make my parents feel like they killed me even more,” he said.

In the months leading up to Saturday’s slaying, he also ordered more than $1,000 of body armor and medical supplies on eBay, at least some of which appear to have been delivered to his parents’ home address, The News confirmed. He stored weapons and tactical gear in his bedroom, including the semi-automatic rifle, covered in racist graffiti, that he later used to shoot 13 people. He also tried on bulletproof vests, combat helmets and safety glasses in one of the two bathrooms in his parents’ home, photographing himself wearing the gear in the bathroom mirror. 

As the planned date for his attack neared, Gendron wrote that he was growing increasingly “stressed” that his parents would discover the plot. He had lied to them about attending college classes, the messages say, and moved guns around their home when they were out or on different floors of the house. As of March 22, he was no longer enrolled at SUNY Broome, a college spokeswoman said in a statement. On March 26, according to the messages, Gendron also received a mailed citation for a speeding ticket he received while traveling to Buffalo in secret. 

“I'm compromised guys!” He wrote, adding that “now my dad knows I was hours away doing something I shouldn't have.” Gendron told his parents he had skipped class that day to hike in Letchworth State Park, instead. 

“My parents know something’s wrong,” he wrote on April 15, writing that he needed to carry out the attack sooner.

On April 29, the messages say, he wrote a goodbye letter to his family and placed it in a drawer near his computer. 

News staff reporter Jay Tokasz contributed to this story.