The white gunman accused of massacring 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket wrote as far back as November about staging a livestreamed attack on African Americans, practiced shooting from his car and traveled hours from his home in March to scout out the store, according to detailed diary entries he appears to have posted online.
The author of the diary posted hand-drawn maps of the grocery store along with tallies of the number of Black people he counted there, and recounted how a Black security guard at the supermarket confronted him that day to ask what he was up to. A Black security guard was among the dead in Saturday's shooting rampage.
The diary taken from the chat platform Discord came to light two days after 18-year-old Payton Gendron allegedly opened fire with an AR-15-style rifle at the Tops Friendly Market. He was wearing body armor and used a helmet camera to livestream the bloodbath on the internet, authorities said.
He surrendered inside the supermarket and was arraigned on a murder charge over the weekend. He pleaded not guilty and was jailed under a suicide watch. Federal authorities are contemplating bringing hate crime charges, as he is scheduled to appear in Erie County Court Thursday morning.
Copies of the online materials were shared with The Associated Press by Marc-André Argentino, a research fellow at the London-based International Centre for the Study of Radicalisation and Political Violence.
A transcript of the diary entries was apparently posted publicly sometime ahead of the attack. It was not clear how many people might have seen the entries. Experts said it was possible but unlikely the diary could have been altered by someone other than the author.
The FBI's top agent in Buffalo, Stephen Belongia, indicated on a call with other officials Monday that investigators are looking at Gendron's Discord activity, citing posts last summer about body armor and guns and others last month in which he taunted federal authorities. Belongia gave no details in the call, a recording of which the AP obtained.
But in an April 17 post apparently by Gendron, he exhorted readers to kill agents from the FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives.
Messages seeking comment were left with Gendron's lawyers. No one answered the door at his family's home.
The online diary details a March 8 reconnaissance visit the writer made to Buffalo, about 200 miles (320 kilometers) from Gendron's home in Conklin, New York.
Buffalo Police Commissioner Joseph Gramaglia said at a news conference that there was information indicating Gendron was in Buffalo in March, but Gramaglia declined to say more.
The commissioner said numerous investigators are working to obtain and review Gendron's online postings.
"There's a lot of social that's being looked at, or that's being verified, captured," Gramaglia said. "Some of that takes warrants that have to be served on various social media platforms."
The author of the diary talked about checking out targets including the Tops Friendly Market and said a security guard asked what he was doing after his second visit of the day. He gave an excuse about collecting data and soon left — "a close call," he wrote.
A 180-page document purportedly written by Gendron said the attack was intended to terrorize all nonwhite, non-Christian people and get them to leave the country. Federal authorities said they are working to confirm the document's authenticity.
Gendron had briefly been on authorities' radar last spring, when state police were called to his high school for a report that the then-17-year-old had made threatening statements.
Belongia, the FBI agent, said Gendron had responded to a question about future plans by saying that he wanted to commit a murder-suicide.
A December Discord post that Gendron apparently made said he had given that answer to a question about retirement in an economics class and ended up spending "one of the worst nights of my life" in a hospital.
Gramaglia said Gendron had no further contact with law enforcement after a mental health evaluation that put him in a hospital for a day and a half. On the call with Belongia, Gramaglia said state police "did everything within the confines of the law" at that time.
It was unclear whether officials could have invoked New York's "red flag" regulation, which lets law enforcement, school officials and families ask a court to order the seizure of guns from people considered dangerous.
Federal law bars people from owning guns if a judge has determined they have a "mental defect" or they have been forced into a mental institution. An evaluation alone would not trigger the prohibition.
Zeneta Everhart said her son, supermarket employee Zaire Goodman, was helping a shopper outside when he saw a man get out of a car in military gear and point a gun at him. Then a bullet hit Goodman in the neck.
"Mom! Mom, get here now, get here now! I got shot!" he told his mother by phone. Goodman, 20, was out of the hospital and doing well Monday, his mother said.
In livestreamed video of the attack circulating online, the gunman trained his weapon on a white person cowering behind a checkout counter, but said, "Sorry!" and didn't shoot. Screenshots purporting to be from the broadcast appear to show a racial slur against Black people scrawled on his rifle.
Word also spread swiftly Monday that the suspected gunman had considered attacking a variety of targets in Rochester.
Circulated widely were screenshots of posts from Discord that offered specific details on how the author of the posts would carry out attacks at different locations. The purported author went by the pseudonym “Jimboboiii,” which was the same username under which Gendron reportedly live-streamed the carnage at Tops.
The author identified by name several churches and a small restaurant in Rochester neighborhoods whose residents are predominantly Black. The author also wrote about visiting the intersection of West Main Street and West Avenue “to shoot blacks” and filing a fake report of a Black man waving a gun “at the Walgreens near Brooks Avenue” to throw police off his trail.
The messages, four in total, were dated earlier this year, from January through March.
“We’re becoming aware of it just like everybody else is, we’re offering our assistance to Buffalo Police and the FBI,” said Greg Bello, spokesperson for the Rochester Police Department. “Any time you become aware of information that’s a threat to the Rochester area, we obviously take it seriously and do whatever steps are necessary.”
Bello said the author of the posts was Gendron. The FBI does not comment on its investigations.
Sabrina LaMar, president of the Monroe County Legislature, issued a statement Monday that decried the attack in Buffalo and imagined how it might have unfolded in Rochester.
"It is a sobering realization that if Erie County Inmate #157103 had not changed his planned attack, it could have occurred right here in Rochester," she said, referring to the shooter by his inmate number. "The victims could be even closer to home — our direct neighbors, family members, friends, or even you or me."
