He Chose the Zip Code First. Ten People Were Buying Groceries.

The Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue is the only full grocery store in its part of Buffalo's East Side. Getting it built took the neighborhood years of organizing, because supermarkets do not rush into Black neighborhoods. On Saturday afternoon, May 14, Payton Gendron, eighteen years old, drove more than three hours from Conklin, New York, parked outside it, and killed ten people.

Aaron Salter was a retired Buffalo police officer working security. He shot the gunman, whose body armor stopped the round, and was killed returning fire. Katherine Massey wrote letters to the Buffalo News about gun violence in her city. Heyward Patterson drove a jitney, giving neighbors rides home with their groceries. Ruth Whitfield, at eighty-six, had just come from visiting her husband at his nursing home, as she did every day.

I. THE SPREADSHEET

What separates this from the general category of American mass shootings is the planning method, which reads less like rage than like market research.

He searched for zip codes by racial composition. He identified the one within reach that had the highest proportion of Black residents. He scouted the store in advance, counted the people inside at different hours, and returned on a Saturday afternoon because that is when a grocery store is full. He livestreamed it, wearing a camera, so that the video would circulate.

And he left a long document explaining the reasoning, which cites the Great Replacement by name. His stated purpose was to kill Black people to prevent white people from being replaced, and to inspire others to do the same.

II. THE FOURTH ONE

This is the fourth mass murder in this archive committed by a man who wrote down this specific theory before acting.

Pittsburgh, October 2018: eleven dead, "invaders." Christchurch, March 2019: fifty-one dead, in a document titled, in full, The Great Replacement. El Paso, August 2019: twenty-three dead, "the Hispanic invasion of Texas." Buffalo, May 2022: ten dead, the theory named outright.

Ninety-five people, in three years and eight months, killed by men who each explained in advance that they were defending their race against a deliberate demographic plot. At what point does a pattern this consistent stop being a series of unrelated tragedies committed by disturbed loners and start being what it obviously is: a doctrine with adherents, doing what the doctrine tells adherents to do?

III. WHERE AN EIGHTEEN-YEAR-OLD GETS THIS

Gendron was radicalized online during the pandemic, by his own account, on the boards where this material is manufactured. That much is standard and, by now, unsurprising.

What is not standard is the year that preceded it. Beginning in April 2021, Tucker Carlson told roughly three million viewers a night that the Democratic Party is deliberately importing "more obedient voters from the Third World." The ADL asked Fox to remove him. Fox's leadership wrote back defending him, and he continued. Analysts have since counted hundreds of episodes in which his program advanced the replacement premise.

The polling arrived this month, and it is the reason this page keeps insisting the word "fringe" has expired. An AP-NORC survey finds roughly one in three American adults agreeing that a deliberate effort is underway to replace native-born Americans. Among viewers of Fox, 31 percent; among OANN and Newsmax viewers, 45. A Yahoo News/YouGov poll puts agreement among 2020 Trump voters at 61 percent.

The full lineage, from the 1916 bestseller to the fourteen words to the primetime slot, is documented in this site's standing dossier. Jefferson Avenue's only grocery store is now a crime scene, and the neighborhood that spent years getting it built has to drive again.