Payton Gendron aspired to be an engineer like his parents but things changed in recent times, his parents said. The revelation comes as Federal agents interviewed the parents of the the18-year-old shooter who allegedly shot dead 10 people in a Buffalo supermarket on Saturday and left several injured.
Paul and Pamela Gendron, both civil engineers with the state Department of Transportation, were interviewed by police on Sunday and according to sources, the devastated couple is cooperating with investigators. Photos at the home of Gendrons on Sunday showed Federal agents minutely sifting through a range of items in a large shed on the property.
Life that Changed
Payton Gendron of Conklin, New York, traveled over three hours to a grocery store on Saturday and shot 13 individuals, killing 10 of them. Authorities suspect the assault was planned on residents of a predominately Black area in upstate New York.
On Sunday, police interviewed, Gendron's parents, Paul and Pamela, who reportedly are cooperating with the investigators. The devasted parents said that Payton also aspired to be an engineer like them.
According to ABC News, Payton was a former student at Broome County Community College, where he aspired to be an engineer like his parents.
Terry Place, who lives a few doors down from the Gendrons in Conklin, said his family had had sporadic interactions with the shooter's parents and only knew Payton as their old paperboy.
"We spoke to her a couple times here and there," Terry Place said of Pamela Gendron, who was known to take morning walks along their quiet street in recent years.
Dark Past
Everything was going right for Payton but things changed a few years back, according to his parents. According to the police, last year, Payton threatened to shoot a classmate at his graduation.
After police investigated the event, Gendron was referred for a mental health evaluation and counseling. According to his peers, he acted strangely at times and held strong political ideas.
Initial investigations have revealed that Gendron had routinely accessed sites preaching white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories, and had extensively researched the 2019 mosque killings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed hundreds at a summer camp in Norway in 2011.
Investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the Tops Friendly Market and was searching for communities with a high number of African American residents, the official said.
It wasn't immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York to Buffalo and that particular grocery store. The market is in a largely African-American area.
"It's just too much. I'm trying to bear witness but it's just too much. You can't even go to the damn store in peace," Yvonne Woodard, a Buffalo resident, told the AP. "It's just crazy."
In an interview with ABC on Sunday, Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said that Gendron had been in town "at least the day before."
"It seems that he had come here to scope out the area, to do a little reconnaissance work on the area before he carried out his just evil, sickening act," Gramaglia said.
Meanwhile, a law enforcement official said that federal agents were still seeking to verify the veracity of a racist 180-page manifesto that outlined the plot and named Gendron by name as the gunman.
However, the shooting, which was the latest act of mass violence in a country riven by racial tensions, gun violence, and a recent rash of hate crimes, left locals devastated.
