For Wayne Jones Sr., discussion of the horrific supermarket shooting in Buffalo, New York, in which a white supremacist killed 10 people, including Jones’ mother, Celestine Chaney, has consumed much of his life over the past four years.
He can innocuously list talking points for media and panels on gun violence. But thinking about his absence every day is one of the reasons Jones doesn’t want to see Payton Gendron sentenced to death.
“I really think he should just sit back and think about it year after year and just be unhappy,” said Jones, who plans to attend the trial. “When I was younger, I was probably more inclined to say ‘kill him.’ But, at this point, I mean, he still has 20 to 30 years of appeal left.
The final phase of jury selection began Tuesday in the federal trial in which Gendron faces the death penalty if convicted. The 2022 Tops Friendly Market attack is considered the deadliest hate-motivated shooting targeting Black people in the United States by a lone gunman in the last century.
Gendron has pleaded not guilty to two dozen federal hate crime charges and more than a dozen gun-related charges. Life imprisonment is generally the alternative to death in a federal capital murder case. Gendron is already serving life in prison after pleading guilty to state murder charges during a 2023 trial in which he tearfully admitted to the crimes and renounced his past views.
His defense team does not dispute his guilt. Their only goal is to ensure that Gendron is not executed.
“Nothing will change the fact that Payton Gendron will die in prison,” the federal public defender’s office said in a statement. “At trial, we will present mitigating evidence regarding Payton for the jury to consider in making its decision. Nothing we say or do is intended to be disrespectful or insensitive to the victims, survivors or their loved ones.”
Relatives of some victims, however, are not completely opposed to the death penalty.
“I never said here, ‘Yeah! Go for the death penalty.’ That’s never been my case,” said Buffalo Common Council member Zeneta Everhart, who ran for office more than a year after her son, Zaire, survived the shooting. “Ten people died that day blatantly and in a horrible, terrible, traumatic way. »
Her son, now 25, and the two other survivors have seen their lives irrevocably turned upside down, she added.
How racist conspiracy theories played a role in the attack
On May 14, 2022, Gendron, then 18, drove more than 200 miles from his home in Conklin, a predominantly white rural town, to Buffalo. He fired about 60 shots from a semi-automatic rifle at supermarket employees and shoppers. The video reveals that Gendron apologized to a white store employee after shooting him in the leg. He turned himself in to the police as he was leaving the supermarket.
Investigators discovered social media posts and other writings by Gendron dedicated to planning an attack to scare non-white and non-Christian people into leaving the United States. He also promoted a baseless “great replacement theory” that people of color would replace whites through higher birth rates and immigration.
The victims killed were all black and aged 32 to 86. Besides Chaney, they included Geraldine Talley, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Andre Mackneil, church deacon Heyward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison and Aaron Salter, a retired Buffalo police officer who worked as a security guard.
Under the presidency of Joe Biden, the US Department of Justice decided in 2024 to impose a death sentence. It was the first capital case overseen by then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had previously established a moratorium on the death penalty.
Gendron and his legal team said he would plead guilty in his federal case in exchange for a life sentence. The Justice Department rejected this proposal.
Anti-Black crimes remain at the top of hate crime data
The 2022 shooting stands out as one of the deadliest acts of anti-Black violence in modern U.S. history. It also reflects a grim reality represented in skewed national crime statistics.
Black people have been the “No. 1 digital target” every year since the FBI began collecting data in 1991, said Brian Levin, a hate crimes analyst with the California Association of Human Relations Organizations. The record was 3,670 incidents of anti-Black prejudice in 1996.
According to FBI data released in August, law enforcement reported more than 2,800 incidents of hate crimes against Black people in 2025, nearly three times the number targeting Latinos. The FBI also reported a 7% drop in hate crime incidents between 2024 and 2025.
The Buffalo shootings and the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church shooting, in which a white gunman killed nine black worshipers, show how online radicalization has also made it a matter of terrorism.
“Unfortunately, he (Gendron) fits the pattern of young, mostly white men engaging in targeted killings that are then justified by manifestos, which are also part of an ongoing chain that often references past attacks but seeks to encourage future attacks,” Levin said.
Everhart, whose son still has shrapnel in his body after being shot in the neck, says improving hate crimes may be the only deterrent.
“This is not a shooting following a robbery or a domestic violence situation. This is domestic terrorism,” Everhart said. “It’s important that we seek the death penalty in this case. But if he doesn’t get it, I know justice will be served.”
Garnell Whitfield lost his 86-year-old mother Ruth in the shooting. He has no idea whether the death penalty should be imposed, because “it’s the federal government doing what they think they should do.”
He has spent the past four years honoring his mother’s memory by working with religious groups, victims’ rights groups, gun lobbyists and others to combat white nationalist movements and racial violence.
Whitfield said he hoped the trial testimony would reveal more about “the support he (Gendron) may have received, the radicalization, social media and societal ills that caused people to hate and be violent that are inherent in our society” that preceded the killing.
“These are the things that I care about,” he said.
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