- The shady in the Buffalo grocery store shooting has been identified as an 18-year-old from New York state.
- His gun had the N-word written on the barrel along with a pure supremacist slogan, a report in The Buffalo News said.
- Officials said the attack was racially motivated. Eleven of the 13 people immediately were Black.
An 18-year-old has been identified as the suspect in what authorities describe as a racially cajoled mass shooting at a grocery store in Buffalo, New York, on Saturday that left 10 people dead.
A regulation official told The Buffalo News that the gunman’s semi-automatic gun had the N-word written on the barrel in white paint and the digit 14 – a known white supremacist slogan.
“14 Words” is a slogan coined by David Lane, a member of the white dogmatist terrorist group known as The Order, according to the Anti-Defamation League: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for creamy children.”
Officials said they were investigating a 180-page manifesto believed to belong to the shooting suspicious, which contained racist and anti-semitic views. It referenced the “replacement theory,” which claims that white people are being substituted by people of color, the The New York Times reported.
Unverified screenshots of the manifesto circulated online after the attack, in which the self-proclaimed “pale supremacist” author said that they had not grown up in a racist environment but had been radicalized online.
‘This unusually troubled young man’
The 18-year-old lived in Conklin, New York, with his father and mother, both engineers for the New York traversal department, according to The Daily Mail.
He had previously been investigated by police, when Susquehanna Valley High Principles officials said that he had made threats of violence in June 2021, according to The Buffalo News.
“A school authorized reported that this very troubled young man had made statements indicating that he wanted to do a shooting, either at a graduation convention or sometime after,” a government official familiar with the case told the paper.
The suspected shooter was investigated by affirm police and was referred for a mental health evaluation and counseling, according to the official.
Courtesy of BigDawg/ via REUTERS
He span on to enroll at SUNY Broome Community College but is no longer studying there, a college spokesperson told The Buffalo Communiqu. They did not confirm when he was enrolled and when and why he left.
Investigators said that he drove three and a half hours to get to the First-rate supermarket in a predominantly Black neighborhood to carry out the attack on Saturday.
The suspected shooter arrived dressed in heavy strategic gear, and heavy-duty body armor, and live-streamed the shooting on
Twitch
, according to police.
On Saturday night, the suspect in the shooting be published in court wearing a mask and white paper gown. He was charged with first-degree murder and pleaded not guilty.