As families across the US celebrated Mother’s Day, several hundred people – including prominent elected officials – gathered at Buffalo’s Jefferson Avenue Tops Friendly market for a different reason: to mark the first anniversary of the day a white supremacist gunman drove several hours to Buffalo’s East Side and murdered 10 people at gunpoint.
People from across New York state, the US and Canada had come to the predominantly Black neighborhood to show support after the shooting. And Sunday was no different as speakers hailed Buffalo residents’ resilience 12 months on from the mass killing that left their city bereaved.
For the Moment of Remembrance – whose attendees included the New York governor, Kathy Hochul; the attorney general, Letitia James; US Senate majority leader Chuck Schumer; and Buffalo mayor Byron Brown – the Tops was closed.
In its parking lot, a white tent sheltered those who were to speak, family members of the shooting victims, some community members and others, including civil rights activist Al Sharpton. Hundreds of people formed a mass that surrounded the tent, craning to hear the speeches and, at times, calling for the public address system to be turned up. Police blocked cars from driving down that block of Jefferson Avenue.
“It was 365 days ago when a white supremacist drove two hours to our great city with the expressed intent of killing as many Black people as possible,” said Mayor Brown, who – like many of the public officials there – spoke to the gathered crowd. “He took 10 lives, 10 precious lives, and injured three others and left an entire city traumatized and grieving.”
But Brown, like the others who followed him, exalted Buffalo’s collective emotional strength.
“In the days, weeks and months since the mass shooting, Buffalonians and western New Yorkers came together in amazing ways, lifted each other up, supported each other in our grief and showed the world why we are known as ‘the City of Good Neighbors’, the way this community came together,” he said.
One woman, Vivian Coffey, stood alone, away from the crowds and so far from the tent that the speakers were barely audible.
Coffey is from the East Side and worked at the Jefferson Tops for almost a decade before transferring to a different location. She was working at another Tops store when she found out about the shooting. Coffey said she spent the last year just trying to heal, a process made complicated by numerous other mass killings in schools and public places elsewhere in the US.
“A lot of the people that passed away were regulars,” she said. “I actually cashed them out and took care of them while I was working there. [I’ve had] a lot of healing.”
At 2.28pm, the exact hour and minute the gunman opened fire a year earlier, those gathered held a moment of silence followed by the chiming of church bells in honor of the slain.
During Sunday’s remembrance, Tops president John Persons reiterated plans to construct a permanent memorial. Until then, though, community members constructed their own tribute.
Tops representatives passed out orange, white and yellow roses to those in attendance at Sunday’s ceremony. Afterward, people placed the flowers outside a makeshift memorial at a nearby corner, just as they had done one year ago.
One of the first to do so was Chakera Griffin. Her uncle, Hayward Patterson, was one of the victims of the shooting. She was born in Buffalo and grew up “not even two blocks” from the Tops. Even if it weren’t for a member of her family, she would have come to the remembrance, she said.
“Not even just Buffalo, but anyone involved in a massacre, even after the year goes by, the days go by, it still hurts,” she said. She said the pain has not subsided much even after the killer pleaded guilty to murder and received a sentence of life imprisonment without the possibility of parole.
“It’s really not going to stop in reality,” Griffin added. “We want it to stop, but it’s not going to stop.”
After the shooting, officials closed the Tops store for two months and a day to allow for remodeling. Now that the store has reopened, Griffin said it was important for her to go back.
“It’s our neighborhood Tops,” she said. “We don’t want to let the shooter think he won. He caused damage, but he didn’t completely break us.”
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