The people of Buffalo mourned the victims of the supermarket shooting that left 10 people dead and three people injured last year.
The Associated Press reported that the City of Buffalo held a moment of silence at 2:28 p.m. which was followed by the tolling of bells in remembrance of the victims killed in the racist attack in the supermarket. A gunman used an AR-15 style rifle to target Black customers in the Buffalo supermarket last year, and was followed the next week by the shooting at a school in Uvalde, Texas, that left 19 children and two teachers dead.
“The racially motivated mass shooting shook our community to its core. It was the day the unthinkable happened,” Mayor Byron Brown said about the commemoration.
The son of Geraldine Talley, a victim in the shooting, also released a book Sunday recounting what he went through after he lost his mother titled “5/14: The Day the Devil Came to Buffalo.”
“I definitely know that she wouldn’t want me to be consumed by sadness and anger,” Talley said of his mother ahead of the anniversary, the AP reported. “So I will definitely try to find strength in her memory and use it to fight injustice and racism for the rest of my life in her name.”
The gunman pled guilty to murder last fall and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole in February. He still has federal charges pending, including federal hate crime and firearm charges, that he pled not guilty to.
President Biden wrote an op-ed in USA Today published Sunday on the one-year anniversary of the Buffalo shooting, urging Congress to ban assault weapons and high-capacity magazines. Biden has reiterated this familiar call in the wake of each mass shooting in the United States, but it has little hope of moving forward in Congress.
“Jill and I visited both communities, spending hours with hundreds of family members who lost pieces of their soul and whose lives will never be the same,” Biden said in the op-ed in USA Today. “They had one message for all of us: Do something. For God’s sake, do something.”