The 19-year-old man who shot 10 people in Buffalo in May has been given an unconditional life sentence. A judge in Erie, Pennsylvania, decided that on Wednesday, according to American media. In addition to the ten murders, Payton Gendron has been convicted of terrorism motivated by hate, among other things.
The gunman had deliberately chosen the supermarket in Buffalo to kill as many black people as possible. He believed in the racist ‘population theory’ and thus thought there was a conspiracy to replace white people with people of color. In a manifesto, he is said to have written that he felt related to the perpetrator of the 2019 New Zealand mosque shooting, which killed 51 people.
Gendron previously called himself a fascist, white ultra-nationalist and anti-Semite, but in court on Wednesday he testified according to CNN sorry. “I can’t believe I actually did it. I believed what I read on the internet and acted out of hatred.”
The ruling was interrupted when a man attacked Gendron, writes The New York Times. Although the judge said after the stoppage that she understood the anger, she disapproved of the outburst. CNN quotes: “We must behave decently, because we are all better than that.”
Read also Schutter in Buffalo believes in the ‘population theory’, a widely shared idea in the US
