He wanted to hunt black people on the streets of Rochester.
The white supremacist from by Binghamton, the one who attacked the Tops in Buffalo, the one who killed 10 and wounded 3, who shouted the n-word at people as he gunned them down.
Rochester was his first choice.
In online posts dated in January and February, the 18-year-old listed streets and businesses and churches in Rochester, possible targets, weighing them for where and when he could find the most black people.
To kill.
Because of the color of their skin.
Black people to kill, in settings where they would be congregated, without too many white people who might get inadvertently caught in his fire.
That’s why he decided against the Hudson Avenue Walmart on a Monday night. Google Maps showed most of the people in the parking lot were white.
That wouldn’t do.
He was looking for blacks.
So he mused about the Arnett Café.
The Arnett Café, where the waitress puts up with our crap when we laugh too loud and linger long over the Lovely Warren special – deep-fried wings, and shrimp and grits. The Arnett Café, where the last time I was there I saw a congressional candidate and a volunteer fireman and the president of the county legislature and a lady who ran the office for the local Democratic Party.
The Arnett Café, where the phrase “black people” shows equal respect for both words.
This is where an anti-Semite, fascist, neo-Nazi, white supremacist fan boy decided he could find some black people to kill.
“I wish there was a place where every black person in the city would just stand,” so he could mow them down, he wrote.
Every black person?
The mothers? The children? The elderly and infirm? The young men like himself, just 18, their whole lives in front of them? The poets and the preachers and the doctors and the deliverymen?
Every black person?
The church ladies and the police officers and the business owners? The pre-schoolers coloring with crayons and the high schoolers studying for Regents?
Just kill them all?
Because they are black?
He thought a good place for that might be Epworth Street, which runs behind Wilson high school and south of Zion Hill Missionary Baptist Church, which, by the way, he mentioned by name as a specific place to consider for slaughter.
“They may be in church,” he explained, “but they still steal.”
One wonders how he knew. One wonders if an 18-year-old white kid in the rural Southern Tier knows any black people. Or was his world view limited to the stew of hate sites he sat in for the year of covid lockdown.
“I wish there was a way I could tell all the whites to leave before I start,” he wrote in February. “Midday Monday would be best for the supermarket option, since hopefully most of the whites are working and blacks are not.”
He looked at West Main Street, and West Avenue – where there is a Tops Friendly Market – and he thought about shooting down black people on the sidewalk as he drove past. If he needed different transportation, he wrote, he could kill a black person and take his or her car.
To distract the police, and buy himself two or three minutes, he would call in a false alarm – about a black man with a gun – at the Walgreens at Thurston and Brooks, just before he launched his attack. Or maybe some other false call at Rochester General Hospital.
He liked the idea of churches, and cited the attacks of other white supremacists against houses of worship. So he made a list.
The Church of the First Born. Ebenezer Baptist. Lily of the Valley Church of God in Christ. The Abundant Life Faith Center. Goodwill Baptist.
Real places, with real addresses, on real streets, in the city of Rochester. Targets of a madman. Sheep in the eyes of a wolf.
And Mount Olivet Baptist Church.
Where, one morning before covid during Holy Week, I sat on the side and watched and prayed as a full sanctuary and a powerful pulpit praised Christ and preached a gospel of love.
He wanted to kill them.
Because they were black.
At the Dollar Store and Walmart and Aldi and Save-A-Lot.
In Rochester.
“Thurston Road is not a bad spot,” he wrote, planning his grand drive by. “Going north on Thurston, take a right on Chili, continue east on West Main, (up) Broad Street … west on Lyell Avenue.
“Problem is it’s going to be chilly, so I can’t tell who’s black immediately.”
That was his plan in February.
To hunt black people in Rochester.
In our town.
In America, in 2022.