How Buffalo is coping one year after the racist mass shooting

A year ago, Brooklyn Hough was a cashier at Tops Friendly Market, located on Buffalo’s east side. She was 22 years old and worked to support her two children. Hough was out for lunch on a typical quiet Saturday.

Then Payton Gendron arrived at the store. He carried out a racist massacre that would shock the nation and traumatize the city.

Hough heard gunshots and then screams. At first, he thought they were going to rob the store. He fled out the back of the store.

“I didn’t see the murder, but I did see the bodies,” Hough told HuffPost.

She tried to call her boyfriend but her phone was dead so she called her mom. Her mother could also hear other people’s screams.

Gendron murdered 10 black people and injured three others. In his 180-page manifesto, the 18-year-old said he was fighting the “Great Replacement,” a dangerous white supremacist ideology that claims the government and democrats they are deliberately replacing ethnic Europeans with non-Europeans for political and cultural advantage.

In February, a state judge sentenced Gendron to 11 consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole. Just before the judge handed down his sentence, a relative of a victim rebuked the shooter and another man pounced on him, temporarily halting the proceedings.

For Hough and others in Buffalo, the shooter’s calculated acts of violence caused grief that will exist for generations in the community. The May 14 shooting is remembered by local activists as “514.”

The grocery store closed after the murders, although it is now open. Hough had to find other ways to pay her bills and support her young children, so she took another job as a cashier elsewhere. Along the way, she became part of a support group with local activist Myles Carter and others advocating demands on behalf of the survivors of the massacre and support for their predominantly black community.

Hough and Carter remember when President Joe Biden came to town in the days after the tragedy. He spoke with family members who lost loved ones and people who were injured, though Hough wishes he could have met other people who were also in the store.

Ten days after the shooting, another 18-year-old went to Uvalde, Texas, and shot and killed 19 children and two teachers inside a school. Seventeen others were injured but survived the attack. National attention quickly focused on Texas.

Carter says that black people and black communities have been terrorized for years, and that locking up the murderers, while necessary, is not enough.

“For us, Peyton Gendron is the person who hurt us. But Peyton Gendron is a foot soldier in the sea of ​​white supremacy. We don’t have any real justice here because he is one of many. And you can see it happening in history over and over again,” he said.

Racism existed in Buffalo long before Gendron: He wasn’t even the first killer to target the city’s black population.

Four decades ago, a serial killer preyed on the city’s black men, despite pleas from residents for police to connect the dots and stop the violence. Beginning in 1980, a man named Joseph Christopher murdered men with a .22 caliber pistol, seemingly at random, except with regard to their race: they were all black men.

Local black leaders asked city officials to investigate the murders as a conspiracy, but law enforcement continued to work to establish connections between them.

The murders caught the attention of national civil rights activist Rev. Jesse Jackson at the time, who was working with his Rainbow PUSH Coalition. Jackson came to Buffalo to meet with more than 600 black residents in the area.

During the funeral of one of the victims, a carload of white people drove by displaying a mannequin with red painted head injuries and dumped red paint on the victim’s hearse.

Christopher was eventually arrested for killing a 14-year-old black boy and three men, though many other murders were suspected, including some black men who were maimed or even had their hearts ripped out.

To this day, the city is plagued with cases of racism, including some emanating from the Buffalo police. In 2006, a black officer named Cariol Horne was fired from the department and lost her pension after she stopped a fellow officer from choking a black man while she was handcuffed.

Fourteen years later, after the murder of George Floyd, Buffalo would adopt what would become known as “Cariol’s Law,” which requires officers to intervene if another officer uses excessive force.

More recently, Buffalo Police Captain Amber Beyer she was named in a lawsuit and reassigned within the department after black staff said she went on a racist tirade. The lawsuit describes Beyer going on a 20-minute tirade and saying that black men were unfaithful to their wives and that blacks commit more crimes than whites.

“White officers get PTSD from working in black neighborhoods, such as Buffalo’s East Side, but black officers do not because they are used to violence and blacks commit more violent crimes than whites,” Beyer allegedly said, according to the lawsuit.

The lawsuit also alleged that Beyer discriminated against black employees by offering white officers with the least seniority overtime to attend conferences and events.

Beyer was reassigned within the department and admitted to violating its rules and regulations after receiving a 30-day unpaid suspension. she took implicit bias training after an internal affairs review.

Carter himself is suing the city’s police department after police accosted and arrested him while he was being interviewed by a local television station in June 2020 amid protests following the murder of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor. The video went viral and Carter was charged with obstruction of government administration and disorderly conduct, though those charges were dropped the following month.

Carter doesn’t think there has been any change in his town after the mass shooting. “People dealing with the 514 tragedy are still stuck at home and not working,” he said.

Carter and Hough want financial and mental support for the survivors, reimbursement for purchases made at Tops the day of the shooting, and support for self-defense training.

While Hough was working at Tops, the state raised the minimum wage to $13.20, but it still wasn’t enough to make ends meet. He would like to see Buffalo Public Schools, the school district from which he graduated, get a lot more attention and money.

five city schools were recently included on a list of underfunded and high-need schools in the state, according to a report from the New York State Department of Education. (In March 2021, New York Democratic Rep. Brian Higgins Announced Buffalo schools would receive $814 million plus an additional $232 million from the American Rescue Plan).

Meanwhile, Hough harbors deep concern that more young white men are being influenced by racist mass murder.

“These kids have the idea that they don’t like blacks. There are evil people in this world waking up and wanting to kill people. Taking mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers and uncles from his family. And there’s too much going on,” Hough said.

She said if people make it out of Buffalo, that’s an accomplishment. She and other survivors and activists are calling for more job opportunities for blacks.

“If you get out of Buffalo and you’re successful, I congratulate you,” Hough said. “I feel like the state and the government designed Buffalo to be like this; no one is motivated to try to achieve it.”

And he’s still waiting for the government to do something about gun violence in the country.

“This is America, this is what they do. Before this, there was another and another. And it is the same cycle, nothing is done for the people and nothing is done for armed violence.”