Cries, screams and threats: The sentencing hearing of a young white supremacist who killed ten black people in May at a supermarket in Buffalo, in the northern United States, was marked by a surge of emotions, but also strong denunciations of racism.
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Payton Gendron, 19, had to be escorted out of court when a man lunged at him. “I want to strangle you”, had just started shouting, Barbara Massey Mapps, whose sister Katherine was mowed down by her bullets.
“I understand the emotion, I understand the anger, but it can’t take place in court,” Judge Susan Eagan said after a short hearing break. “We are better than that!”
Dressed in an orange prisoner’s outfit, the young man seemed to contain his tears at times, but managed not to lose his composure as the distress exploded in the Buffalo court.
In November, he pleaded guilty to racist murders and acts of terrorism in New York State justice and was sentenced to an irreducible sentence of life in prison.
Before pronouncing the sentence, Judge Eagan gave the floor to the relatives of her victims. Kimberly Salter, who lost her husband Aaron, a security guard at the targeted supermarket, came in red and black, “the colors of the bloodshed” and “our mourning”.
“We all know the hatred and the motives for your racist crime, but we are here to tell you that you have failed,” said Simone Crawley, whose grandmother Ruth Whitfield died while shopping. “Despite our wounds, we will not let you win this war.”
The United States authorizing double prosecution, Payton Gendron is also charged with “racist crimes” by federal justice, which has not ruled out at this stage to seek the death penalty.
On May 14, after months of preparation, he went to a Buffalo supermarket in combat gear, armed with an AR-15 semi-automatic rifle and a camera broadcasting his actions live on the internet. .
He had moved methodically out of the parking lot and then into the store, shooting at customers and employees. He had killed ten people, aged 32 to 86, and injured three.
In his posts and a racist, supremacist and conspiratorial manifesto attributed to him, Payton Gendron had written several months before the massacre that he wanted to kill black people and that he was targeting a poor and isolated neighborhood in Buffalo because of his high proportion of African Americans.
He had also made a reconnaissance trip before the massacre in Buffalo, 300 km north of his home.
The carnage had shocked the United States, doubled ten days later by another massacre with a semi-automatic rifle perpetrated by an 18-year-old young man, who had killed 19 children and two teachers at a school in Uvalde, Texas.
These killings, the list of which has since continued to grow, have revived the recurring debate about a lack of gun regulation in the United States. The Gun Violence Archive site has already identified, since January 1, six gun dramas that have left at least four dead, and 71 shootings that have left at least four injured.