Six-and-a-half months ago, a gunman descended on Buffalo's East Side Tops and, through an act of racist violence, shattered a community's sense of security and peace. In his wake, 10 people were killed and countless lives were irrevocably changed.
In the early moments before the horrific details of the shooting fully emerged, East Side native Glen Marshall felt he needed to get back home. He needed, like the hundreds of others that gathered then, to be present, to be in community, to honor the lives lost and support the grieving community.
“This is the neighborhood Tops, this is the Black community – this is the heart of the Black community,” Marshall said at the time. “If we don’t live in this community, we grew up in this community. Everybody comes back to the community.”
More details have emerged in the months since the May 14 shooting at a Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue: about the perpetuator, about his motives and about the victims. And on Monday morning, Payton Gendron pleaded guilty and admitted that he fatally shot 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket in May.
In state court in Buffalo, Gendron faced 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime and three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime, as well as other assorted charges. He pleaded guilty to the state indictment, but not the entire indictment. Some murder charges were subsumed by others.
Gendron faces a penalty of life without parole. He also is facing federal hate crime charges that could carry the death penalty. He was 18 at the time of the homicides. He is scheduled to be sentenced on Feb. 15.
But some community members said Monday that a guilty plea cannot heal the wounds of his crime, nor will it bring the victims back.
'Nothing is going to change'
As the shooter live-streamed his actions, few people doubted his guilt. Marshall said Gendron should not receive any kudos for legally admitting his wrong doing, but that a life sentence would prevent the shooter from leaving prison and committing another heinous act. While Gendron is behind bars, Marshall hopes he will have time to consider his actions and potentially reform.
“I rather him have life over (an execution),” Marshall said. “He needs to understand for the rest of his life what he did. As he gets older and becomes more of a mature man, maybe he’ll be able to realize what he did and maybe somehow he’ll find it in himself to create some positive effort in his life.”
But the harm is done, Jillian Hanesworth said, and she doesn’t believe there’s anything that could happen in a courtroom to reverse the damage. Hanesworth is a community activist, organizer and Buffalo’s first poet laureate. Her poem “Water” is enshrined at the remodeled Tops as part of an in-store memorial to the victims.
“What’s done is done,” she said. “We can’t have such a reactionary system. We need to figure out ways to prevent this harm, because putting somebody behind bars and paying for them out of tax dollars to stay there — that’s not justice.”
Raqueal "RaRa" Watson doesn't believe that anything will change until laws will change. She was disillusioned by the situation in Buffalo prior to the shooting, and the tragedy at Tops only confirmed her concerns.
“Nothing is ever going to change until the laws are changed," she said. "Nothing is going to change. People are going to keep thinking it’s okay to kill black people, and it’s not. It’s not okay. When is enough enough? It’s not okay.”
Said Hanesworth: "We are beyond the point of looking for justice."
"Justice happens in prevention and nothing was done to prevent this," she said. "Systemically, around the country, nothing is being done to prevent these kinds of acts, so it’s hard to celebrate a court ruling when he shouldn’t have gotten there in the first place."
'Power needs to be given back to our communities'
Following the shooting, the East Side’s Tops closed, causing the neighborhood to become a food desert. For weeks afterward, people from across the city, region and country mobilized to fill in the gaps and pass out food and other items to community members.
Watson, an East Sider, participated in the distribution efforts. She regularly manned a table in the parking lot of the nearby Family Dollar from which she and other community members passed out toiletries and other items. When President Joe Biden visited shortly after the shooting, Watson said nothing would come from the visit, that nothing would change. Months later, she still holds that belief.
“The community is still hurting because nothing is ever going to change,” she said.
Watson said she believes the Tops should not have reopened. She said the reopening, like Biden's visit and the national attention it brought, was only indicative of problems community members have cited for decades.
“That has been the worst Tops in Buffalo for years,” she said. “A shooting happened where a lot of Black people were killed and you want to remodel it and open it back up like everything is okay? It’s not … Even him pleading guilty is not going to change anything.”
Since the shooting, East Siders have pointed out the fact that they are still not being listened to or centered in conversations about their own community.
“I think the community needs a voice,” Hanesworth said. “I think we need community-led committees and boards across the country that can really look at what’s happening in our communities that can work to reimagine what public safety even means, reimagine the role that weapons play in our society and that police play in our cities. I think power needs to be given back to our communities.”
Marshall said it has been up to the community to move forward and to “live life on life’s terms” since the shooting. Nearly seven months later, Marshall is still driven by the need to be there in support for his community.
“We just gotta continue to do what we need to do to strengthen our community in whatever way we can," he said. "It’s going to be a lot of people talking about it today, and really that’s a good thing, you know? We need to keep this thing alive, you know?
"You don’t want to forget because you don’t want to have it repeated. We want to do the things that are necessary to strengthen our community, so we won’t be hit like this so hard next time.”
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"One is absolutely sickened, not by the crimes that the wicked have committed,
but by the punishments that the good have inflicted." -- Oscar Wilde
