An 18-year-old white gunman, identified as Peyton Gendron was the shooter at Tops, a grocery store in a Black neighbourhood of Buffalo, New York.
He killed 10 people and wounded three others before surrendering to authorities.
The authorities called the deadly shooting a hate crime and an act of “racially motivated violent extremism.”
Authorities said Gendron, who was armed with an assault-style rifle and appeared to have acted alone, drove to Buffalo from his home in a New York county “hours away” to target the store in an attack he broadcast on the internet.
Eleven of the 13 people struck by gunfire were Black, officials said.
Gendron was heavily armed and dressed in tactical gear, including body armour, police said.
When confronted by officers in a vestibule of the store, he held a gun to his own neck but they talked him into dropping the weapon and surrendering, Buffalo police commissioner Joseph Gramaglia told a news briefing.
Gramaglia said the gunman shot and killed three people in the parking lot of the Tops Friendly Market before exchanging fire with a former police officer working as a security guard for the store, but the suspect was protected by his body armour.
The guard was one of the 10 people shot to death in the incident, the nine others all being customers. Three other employees of the store, part of a regional chain, were wounded but are expected to survive, authorities said.
Stephen Belongia, the FBI special agent in charge of the bureau’s Buffalo field office, said the attack would be investigated both as a hate crime and as an act of “racially motivated violent extremism” under federal law.
“This person was pure evil,” Erie County Sheriff John Garcia said, his voice quaking with emotion. “It was a straight-up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
The suspect made his first court appearance on Saturday,
He was charged with murder in the first degree.
His lawyer said Gendron is pleading not guilty.
The Judge remanded him without bail. He’ll be back in court Tuesday morning to face murder charges, officials said.
“This is a day of great pain for our community,” Buffalo Mayor Bryon Brown told reporters. “Many of us have been in and out of this supermarket many times. … We cannot let this hateful person divide our community or our country.”
Brown said he had received calls from the White House and New York’s attorney general, Letitia James.
U.S. Representative Jerry Nadler, a New York Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, said the attack appeared to be the work of a violent white supremacist.
“We must pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act, without delay,” he wrote on Twitter.
