Does Payton Gendron have lizard brain? Family says Covid-19 prompted Buffalo gunman's crime
BUFFALO, NEW YORK: Buffalo shooter Payton Gendron's relatives have claimed that the Covid-19 pandemic made the teen carry out the massacre. On Monday, May 16, Gendron's relatives said that he possibly snapped due to paranoia and isolation caused by the pandemic.
The relatives also claimed that they had no clue that Gendron, 18, was an alleged White supremacist. They admitted that he needed help after he threatened his high-school classmates almost a year ago. However, they said they are unsure if he ever received help.
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“I have no idea how he could have gotten caught up in this. I blame it on COVID,’’ New York Post quoted Sandra Komoroff, 68, a cousin of Gendron’s mom Pamela, as saying. "He was very paranoid about getting COVID, extremely paranoid, to the point that — his friends were saying — he would wear the hazmat suit [to school]."
"And then he got COVID just a few weeks ago. … He went to family functions with a respirator mask on. He totally wasn’t going to get COVID — and then he got COVID," she said of Gendron, adding that the family was "vaxxed to the max." "I don’t know if it was a bad case, I just know he caught it," she said.
Sandra said that Gendron had “bought into the fear of COVID." “That’s the only way to say it. And when you’re home all day on the Internet, you’re missing out on human contact,” she said. “There’s a lot of emotions and a lot of body language you’re not getting [as] when you see their face.”
Sandra's husband, Dave Komoroff, 68, said, "In theory, [COVID] could have affected what they call the lizard brain — the part of the brain that controls aggression. I can’t say it’s impossible, but maybe that would happen one out of so many millions of times.”
Since 1954, the brain's limbic system has been implicated as "the seat of emotion, addiction, mood, and lots of other mental and emotional processes," as per Psychology Today. It has been described as the part of the brain that is phylogenetically very primitive. "Many people call it the "Lizard Brain,” because the limbic system is about all a lizard has for brain function. It is in charge of fight, flight, feeding, fear, freezing up, and fornication," Psychology Today says.
Gendron is reportedly believed to have posted a white supremacist manifesto, outlining his step-by-step plan. Officials revealed that Payton Gendron claimed in a 180-page diatribe that he was 'radicalized' on the internet while he was bored during the early pandemic days, not by people he has personally met. The self-described white supremacist and anti-Semite apparently learned through his "research" that low white birth rates around the world was a "crisis" that "will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people." In one section of the manifesto, Gendron detailed his step-by-step plans for the day of the shooting. He also wrote about the corned beef hash he would eat for breakfast. He planned how he would drive to the supermarket, wear his body armor and carry his gun. He also wrote about live streaming the attack.
The Komoroffs claimed they knew nothing about Gendron's racist leanings. "I don’t know where he went online — the dark Web, or wherever — but apparently he got into some nasty stuff. He’s smart enough to get into dangerous stuff online, which maybe the average person wouldn’t know how to get into," Dave said. "I mean, I’m trying to figure it out myself.”
When Gendron was asked about his future plans in school last year, he had said that he wanted to commit a slay-suicide. Speaking of this, Dave said, "My question is, and I don’t know the answer either, but did they do something?" He added, "The parents are well-to-do. Did they put him in some kind of therapy? Because when they get the civil lawsuit, that’s what’s going to come out. Someone’s gonna ask, ‘What did you do last year after this incident?’ They’ll ask the parents, ‘What did you do? What did you do to help this kid?’ The parents are both college-educated. They’re intelligent. They’re engineers. They’re not hill people. ‘Did you think he needed any help?’"
State Police responding to that incident took Gendron to the hospital for a psych evaluation back at the time. However, he was released after a day and a half. “There should have been lightbulbs going off,’’ Sandra said. “This kid should have been in some kind of empathy training that teaches these are human beings.” The couple claimed that otherwise the teen and his family checked all the boxes of “what you would consider normal.”
“It is a good family, a very good family. It’s unconscionable to me what happened. They’re very average people, God-fearing,” Sandra said. “I don’t understand the racist thing, because my family is the farthest thing from racist. I’ve never heard a racist comment from him, from his parents. It’s almost like he just snapped. Something in him broke. The whole family is in shock."
“I would think that this family checks all the boxes,” Dave said. “I’m trying to figure out the dysfunction, and I just can’t. We were at his graduation. He’s an 18-year-old kid. I said, ‘Congratulations.’ He said, ‘Thank you.’ I said, ‘What do you intend to do?’ He said, ‘Be an engineer like my mom and dad.’ I just don’t see how this happened, but apparently this has been germinating for a long time.”
Gendron reportedly began planning the attack in January. He chose the Tops Supermarket in Buffalo because “it has the highest black population percentage” by Zip code, and also because it was not very far away from his Southern Tier home. Reportedly, the Buffalo massacre is the latest in a wave of mass shootings that were inspired by the 'Great Replacement theory' — a racist theory popular among white supremacists and the far-right.
Gendron made a “reconnaissance” trip to the Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo a day before he gunned down 10 people there, the city’s police commissioner reportedly said. “We know he did some reconnaissance on the area and in the store,” Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said during a press conference with Gov Kathy Hochul and Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown. “He was in the Buffalo area. He was right in this area the day before,” he added.
Cathy and Jerry Kozlowski, friends of Gendron's parents, told New York Post they were extremely shocked to hear that Gendron had been arrested for the shooting. “When I first heard that this happened … I actually had a different picture in my mind of who the family was — some family living in a trailer park some place in the outskirts, the family with their AR-15s,” Jerry, 74, said.
They said the Gendrons were “an average American family." “You try your best as a parent. Something went wrong,” Jerry said. “Parents miss stuff. You try as a parent the best you can. I’m sure they did. I’m grasping what happened to this young man. Why? What possesses you to go out and buy a device that is going to do that to people?”
“Pam and Paul and the boys — I can’t imagine what that family is going through right now," Cathy said. "For Paul to face going back to work, for Pam to face going back to work, for the boys to face going to school, it’s not going to happen, at least right away. Maybe they’ll have to move somewhere else, because they’re going to get nothing but hate.”
For the uninitiated, 'racially motivated' teen Gendron gunned down ten people and injured three others at a Buffalo supermarket. Payton Gendron, 18, drove from 'hours away' in Conklin, New York, to the Tops market on Jefferson Avenue. The shooting took place in a predominantly Black neighborhood. Eleven of the victims were Black and two of them were White. He was arraigned on a murder charge over the weekend, and federal prosecutors are contemplating hate-crime charges. Gendron has pleaded not guilty.