Federal hate-crimes trial opens in Buffalo supermarket attack that killed 10

Defense to argue for life sentence, will not dispute Gendron’s guilt

Jury selection opened Tuesday in the federal hate crimes trial of Payton Gendron, who killed 10 Black Americans at a Tops Friendly Markets store in Buffalo on May 14, 2022. The trial will determine whether Gendron — already serving life in prison on state murder charges — is sentenced to death or to an additional life sentence in federal custody.

The defense has announced it will not contest Gendron’s guilt, narrowing the trial’s focus to the penalty phase. “Nothing will change the fact that Payton Gendron will die in prison,” the federal public defender’s office said in a statement. “At trial, we will offer mitigating evidence about Payton that the jury needs to consider in making its decision. Nothing we say or do is intended to be disrespectful or insensitive to the victims, the survivors, or their loved ones.”

Gendron was 18 years old on the day of the attack, when he drove more than 200 miles from his home in Conklin, a predominantly white and rural town, to the Tops Friendly Markets store on Jefferson Avenue in Buffalo. Armed with a semiautomatic rifle, he fired around 60 shots at employees and shoppers before surrendering to police as he exited the supermarket. Surveillance video later revealed that he had apologized to a white store worker after shooting him in the leg.

The 10 victims — all Black and between the ages of 32 and 86 — were Pearl Young, Ruth Whitfield, Margus Morrison, Andre Mackneil, Geraldine Talley, Katherine Massey, Heyward Patterson, Roberta Drury, Aaron Salter, and Chaney. Salter was a retired Buffalo police officer working as a security guard at the store. Patterson was a church deacon.

Three people survived the attack, including Zaire Everhart, now 25. His mother Zeneta Everhart, who sits on the Buffalo Common Council, ran for office over a year after her son survived the shooting. She said her son and the two other survivors have had their lives “irrevocably altered.”

Investigators found social media posts and other writings in which Gendron laid out his intention to frighten non-white and non-Christian people into leaving the United States. He also promoted a baseless “great replacement theory” that people of color will replace white people through higher birth rates and immigration.

Hate-crime analyst Brian Levin, of the California Association of Human Relations Organizations, said Gendron “fits the pattern of young, mostly white males undertaking targeted massacres which are then justified by manifestos, which are also part of a continuing chain that references prior attacks often but seeks to encourage future ones.” The Buffalo shooting and the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, in which a white gunman killed nine Black churchgoers, show how online radicalization makes this a terrorism matter as well.

Families of the victims and survivors are divided on whether federal prosecutors should seek the death penalty, with some family members not totally opposed to capital punishment and others opposing it. Zeneta Everhart said she had never personally advocated for the death penalty. “I’ve never been like out here like, ‘Yay! Go for the death penalty.’ That’s never been me,” she said. “Ten people died that day in an egregious way and in an awful, terrible, traumatic way.”

Gendron faces more than two dozen federal hate crime charges and over a dozen firearms charges in the federal case. The federal proceedings are separate from the state murder case in which Gendron was convicted and sentenced to life in prison; only the federal trial carries the possibility of a death sentence.

The Buffalo case has unfolded against a documented pattern of anti-Black bias incidents in the United States. According to FBI data released in August, law enforcement agencies reported more than 2,800 anti-Black hate crime incidents in 2025 — nearly three times the number targeting Latinos. Black people have been the “number one numerical target” of hate crimes annually since the FBI began collecting data in 1991, according to Levin, with the record high of 3,670 anti-Black bias incidents logged in 1996. The FBI also reported a 7% decline in overall hate crime incidents from 2024 to 2025.