Who are Payton Gendron's parents? Neighbor says civil engineers Paul and Pamela 'have a nice family'
Ten people were shot dead and three others wounded in a “racially motivated” mass shooting at a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday, May 14. Law enforcement identified the shooter as Payton Gendron, 18, who 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. “We are investigating this incident as both a hate crime and a case of racially-motivated violent extremism,” said Stephen Belongia, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Buffalo field office said during a press conference. Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said, "This was pure evil. It was a straight-up racially motivated hate crime."
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Gendron has pleaded not guilty to the killings, his lawyer has confirmed, according to the Daily Mail. The shooter reportedly scrawled the N-word on his rifle before carrying out the massacre.
Who are Payton Gendron's parents?
Gendron is the oldest of four children of Paul and Pamela Gendron, both of who are civil engineers working for the New York State Department of Transportation. According to neighbors, the family is upper middle class. "They have a really nice family," neighbor Nancy Santucci said. "They seem like regular people. In a million years I never would think that anyone from this neighborhood would drive to Buffalo to carry out a racially motivated shooting."
Santucci said that the suspect Gendron graduated from Susquehanna Valley High School last year. He recalled how there was a big party on the family home's lawn, decorated with balloons. Santucci said Gendron brought home a human-size Brontosaurs that he had made for a school project.
According to Paul's Facebook profile, he studied at Rutgers University—New Brunswick, and went to Madison Central High School, Old Bridge, NJ. He lives in Conklin, New York and is from Old Bridge, New Jersey. His profile says that he has been married to Pamela since 2001. Pamela Newbury Gendron's social media profile, however, does not reveal much about her.
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 are a 'crisis' that 'will ultimately result in the complete racial and cultural replacement of the European people.'
Talking about other racially motivated killings, Gendron said that he 'mostly agreed' with Brenton Harrison Tarrant, a man who live-streamed his attack which ultimately left 51 people attending a New Zealand mosque in March 2019 dead. 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, New York Post reported.
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. 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.