Thirty minutes before an 18-year-old White man allegedly carried out a racist mass shooting Saturday at a supermarket in a mostly Black enclave of Buffalo, New York, he revealed his monthslong plot to some on social media.Payton S. Gendron — suspected of killing 10 people and wounding three — had created a private chat room on the communications app Discord and invited people to view his chat logs before his attack at the Tops Friendly Markets store, a Discord spokesperson told CNN.
“What we know at this time is that a private, invite-only server was created by the suspect to serve as a personal diary chat log,” a spokesperson for Discord said Tuesday in a statement to CNN. “Approximately 30 minutes prior to the attack, however, a small group of people were invited to and joined the server. Before that, our records indicate no other people saw the diary chat log in this private server.”
In the posts — which CNN has analyzed and later were posted more widely on the hate-filled 4chan online forum — the alleged gunman wrote he visited the supermarket three times March 8 to survey its layout. He also wrote he used Google’s graph feature for a location’s “popular times” to determine the busiest times at the store.
Gendron posted he chose the ZIP code in Buffalo because it was the one with the greatest percentage of Black people that’s relatively near his home in Conklin, New York. The cities are about 230 miles apart.
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