Yesterday (May 19), civil rights attorney Benjamin Crump promised to sue “anybody” and “everybody” who allowed the deadly Buffalo attack to take place.
In a press conference outside the Antioch Baptist Church in Buffalo, New York, Crump said, “We absolutely intend on going after the gun manufacturers, the gun distributors and anybody else who was an accomplice to this young 18-year-old white supremacist.”
“We intend on going after everybody that was an accomplice to this young monster killing these innocent people,” the attorney continued.
As previously reported by REVOLT, on Saturday (May 14), suspected gunman Payton Gendron is accused of walking into a Tops Friendly Markets grocery store unleashing a fury of bullets in a targeted and racially motivated attack. Gendron allegedly drove over 200 miles from Conklin, New York to find a high concentration of Black people to carry out the massacre.
Rev. Al Sharpton was also present at the press conference along with family members of the victims.
Veronica White talked about how her nephew Andre Mackniel went to Tops to purchase a surprise birthday cake for his 3-year-old son when he was fatally shot in the head by the accused gunman.
White fought back tears as she was surrounded by family members and said, “We found out he was dead on Facebook.” She revealed that Mackniel’s young child “keeps thinking his father is asleep” before adding that “he won’t even know his father.”
Tirzah Patterson is now a single parent after her husband Heyward Patterson was gunned down in the attack. She feared for the future of their 12-year-old son, Jake.
“Every day I have to pray and do a check-in with him to make sure he’s not mentally all over the place. His heart is broken. He half-sleeps, he half-eats and as a mother, what am I supposed to do to help him get through this? I need a village to help me raise and be here for my son because he has no father,” Patterson said as she wept.
The widowed mother continued, “They took his father, he will grow up fatherless. He has to live even after this and I have to pray that God gives me strength to raise him to the best of my ability.”
Sharpton joined in on the discussion by applauding President Biden for visiting with the families earlier this week but called for more to be done.
“I’m glad the President came but now we got to do more than come. We got to stop this,” Sharpton said. “It’s time for the President and others to convene on how we stop this,” he continued.