At a Buffalo courthouse on Monday afternoon, 19-year-old Payton Gendron entered a guilty plea for all 25 charges a grand jury indicted him on, including 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three counts of attempted murder, one gun charge, and one domestic terrorism charge, according to the Erie County District Attorney’s Office.
He previously pleaded not guilty to 27 hate crime charges in a separate federal indictment.
During the Monday hearing, Gendron reportedly answered “yes” and “guilty” after the judge read the name of each victim and asked him whether he’d killed them because of their race.
“This critical step represents a condemnation of the racist ideology that fueled his horrific actions on May 14,” Gendron’s lawyer, Brian Parker, told reporters. “It is our hope that a final resolution of the state charges will help in some small way to keep the focus on the needs of the victims and the community.”
The charges stem from a shooting on May 14, 2022, at the Tops Market in Buffalo, New York, in which 10 Black shoppers were shot to death and three other people, two of them white, were wounded. Police arrested Gendron at the scene of the crime wearing military-style fatigues, a bulletproof vest, and carrying an AR-15-style rifle.
Gendron, who livestreamed the massacre on his Twitch account, traveled three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, to carry out the shooting - a location he chose because of its large Black population.
In documents he posted online prior to the shooting, Gendron explained his motivations, including a belief in “Great Replacement Theory,” a white supremacist conspiracy theory that alleges a secret plot to replace white people in the US with people of color or Jews.
Written on his AR-15 rifle were numerous white supremacist symbols and references, including the name of Norwegian mass-murderer Anders Brevik; John Earnest, who attacked a California synagogue in 2019; several racial slurs; and the “Black Sun” symbol used by the Nazis as well as neo-Nazi groups, including the Ukrainian Azov Battalion.
The attack reopened a nationwide discussion about mass shootings and gun control, long difficult topics in US politics, as the country has come to see hundreds of mass shootings per year.