The New York teenager accused of the deadly attack on a Buffalo supermarket previously posted about his brutal murder of a feral cat, according to reports.
Payton Gendron, of Conklin, New York, described stabbing and beheading a cat on the messaging platform Discord in March - seven weeks before he walked into Tops in Buffalo targeting Black victims, killing ten and injuring three others before surrendering to police.
The 18-year-old wrote on Discord that his savage killing of the cat was prompted by the animal’s attack on his own pet.
“When I came home at ~10:30 I was eating pizza bites when I hard my cat Paige scream from the garage,” the New York Post quoted from Gendron’s alleged posting.
“I quickly enter and the gray cat was attacking her. I then spent the next hour and a half chasing the cat around the garage and stabbing it with my knife (the camo one).”
Continuing in grisly detail about the killing, Gendron described how and when the animal bled, even recording times, and writing that he bashed the cat against the concrete floor and hacked at its neck 20 times with a hatchet before its head came off.
He wrote that he dug a shallow grave and buried the cat in a box in the family backyard.
“Honestly right now I don’t feel anything about killing that cat. I thought I would be in pain but I literally just feel blank.”
Gendron, who graduated from high school last year, was arraigned on a state murder charge over the weekend. Represented by a court-appointed public defender, he entered a not guilty plea on his behalf.
Federal prosecutors are also contemplating hate-crime charges; Gendron allegedly wrote a manifesto about his hate for Black people and targeted the Buffalo store in a zip code with the highest percentage of Black residents in the region.
“This was pure evil,” Erie County sheriff John Garcia said on Saturday. “It was straight up racially motivated hate crime from somebody outside of our community.”
