For Wayne Jones, talking about the racist slaughter that stole his mother from him has become a soul-crushing, full-time routine.

Four years after a white supremacist gunned down 10 Black people — including Jones’ 65-year-old mother, Celestine Chaney — at a Tops Friendly Market, Jones can rattle off media talking points in his sleep. But the brutal reality of her daily absence is the exact reason he doesn’t want her killer sent to death row.

“I really think that he should just sit and have to think about it year after year after year and just be miserable,” said Jones, who plans to attend the trial. “When I was younger, I probably was more prone to say ‘kill him.’ But, at this point, I mean, he’s still got well another 20-30 years of appeals.”

Jury selection is set to begin Tuesday in the federal capital trial of Payton Gendron, the admitted gunman facing a potential death sentence for what stands as the deadliest hate-motivated shooting targeting Black people by a single gunman in modern U.S. history.

Gendron is facing 27 federal hate crime charges and 20 firearms charges. He is already serving life in prison without parole after pleading guilty to state murder and terrorism charges in 2023, where he tearfully admitted to the massacre and renounced his white supremacist views.

His federal defense team isn’t even disputing his guilt. Their sole, desperate mission is to save him from lethal injection.

“Nothing will change the fact that Payton Gendron will die in prison,” the Federal Public Defender’s Office said in a statement.

“At trial, we will offer mitigating evidence about Payton that the jury needs to consider in making its decision. Nothing we say or do is intended to be disrespectful or insensitive to the victims, the survivors, or their loved ones.”

While Jones wants the killer to rot in a cell, other victims’ families are demanding the ultimate punishment for the bloodshed.

“I’ve never been like out here like, ‘Yay! Go for the death penalty.’ That’s never been me,” said Buffalo Common Council member Zeneta Everhart, whose son, Zaire Goodman, survived the rampage. “Ten people died that day in an egregious way and in an awful, terrible, traumatic way.”

Her son, now 25, and two other survivors were left permanently scarred by the terror, she added.

A Venomous Conspiracy and a Stream of Blood

On May 14, 2022, an 18-year-old Gendron drove more than 200 miles from his home in Conklin, New York, to a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.

Armed with an assault-style rifle, he sprayed roughly 60 rounds at helpless shoppers and employees. Twisted video footage showed Gendron even apologized to a wounded white store worker before stepping over him. He surrendered to police outside the market.

Investigators uncovered a sickening digital trail: manifestos and social media posts detailing a cold-blooded plot to terrorize non-white, non-Christian Americans. He obsessed over the baseless “Great Replacement” theory — a paranoid fantasy that people of color are conspiring to replace white populations.

The 10 victims killed in the ambush were all Black, ranging in age from 32 to 86: Celestine Chaney, Geraldine Talley, Katherine Massey, Pearl Young, Andre Mackneil, church deacon Heyward Patterson, Ruth Whitfield, Roberta Drury, Margus Morrison, and Aaron Salter, a heroic retired Buffalo police officer working security who died trying to stop the shooter.

Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. Department of Justice announced in 2024 it would seek the death penalty. It marked the first capital case authorized under then-Attorney General Merrick Garland, who had previously imposed a moratorium on federal executions.

Gendron had offered to plead guilty in federal court in exchange for a life sentence, but prosecutors flatly rejected the deal.

A Nation Stalked by Anti-Black Hate

The Buffalo massacre remains a stark symbol of a systemic crisis. According to FBI statistics, Black Americans have been the single most targeted group for hate crimes every single year since the bureau began collecting the data in 1991.

FBI data released in August shows law enforcement agencies reported more than 2,800 anti-Black hate crime incidents in 2025 — nearly three times the number targeting Hispanic or Latino victims, even as overall reported hate crimes fell 7% year-over-year.

Analysts say the Buffalo attack — alongside the 2015 Charleston, South Carolina, church massacre where a white gunman murdered nine Black worshipers — exposes how online radicalization breeds domestic terrorists.

“Unfortunately, he fits the pattern of young, mostly white males undertaking targeted massacres which are then justified by manifestos, which are also part of a continuing chain that references prior attacks often but seeks to encourage future ones,” said Brian Levin, a hate crime analyst with the California Association of Human Relations Organizations.

For Everhart, whose son still carries shrapnel lodged in his neck, nothing short of maximum prosecution will do.

“This isn’t a shooting over a robbery or a domestic violence situation. This is domestic terrorism,” Everhart said. “It is important we go after the death penalty in this case. But if he doesn’t end up getting it, I know that justice will be served.”

Garnell Whitfield, who lost his 86-year-old mother, Ruth, has poured his grief into battling systemic racism, working alongside civil rights advocates, faith leaders, and anti-gun violence organizers. He remains neutral on the death penalty itself, noting it is up to federal prosecutors to take whatever course they deem necessary.

Instead, Whitfield wants the trial to tear open the dark underbelly that created the monster.

He hopes court testimony exposes “the support that he might have had, the radicalization, social media and societal ills that caused people to hate and be violent that are inherent in our society.”

“Those are the things that I care about,” Whitfield said.