Payton Gendron, the shooter who shot up a supermarket in the U.S. city of Buffalo, New York state, pleaded guilty Monday to several state charges, including terrorism, hate crime and murder.
The 19-year-old, who opened fire indiscriminately at a store in a majority-black neighborhood and posted the attack in a social media livestream, has admitted to one count of a hate-motivated domestic terrorism act, ten counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder and one count of weapons possession.
The guilty pleas mean there will be no state trial and Gendron will not appeal, defense attorney Brian Parker has indicated. The charges also carry a mandatory sentence of life in prison without the possibility of parole, CNN reported.
According to police sources confirmed at the time, the young man arrived at 2:30 p.m. (local time) at the supermarket parking lot. After getting out of the vehicle «very heavily armed» and starting to broadcast live what he was about to do, he shot four people who were in the vicinity of his car.
After this first shooting, the young man went inside the supermarket and managed to shoot down a security guard and then continued shooting inside up to 13 people. Eleven of the thirteen people hit by the bullets were black.
Gendron is a proponent of the conspiracy theory known as ‘the great replacement’ which claims that political elites use migration to reduce the white population, according to the Buffalo Police, who shared a 180-page letter written by the suspect.
After the shooting, described as a «racist» act, U.S. President Joe Biden assured that white supremacism is a «poison» for American society. «Evil came to Buffalo and has come to too many places, manifested in gunmen slaughtering innocent people in the name of a hateful and perverse ideology,» he said.
