(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — The supermarket in Buffalo, New York, where a deadly mass shooting occurred in May is officially reopening Friday after extensive renovations.
The Tops Friendly supermarket was closed for months as the site of an active law enforcement investigation into the shooting that killed 10 people and injured three more.
An 18-year-old white male, who has now been indicted on federal hate crime charges, allegedly opened fire in what authorities say was a racially motivated attack. All 10 of those who died were Black.
The store has undergone renovations in the aftermath of the attack, in which the suspected gunman fired more than 60 shots from a high-powered, AR-15-style rifle.
The Tops grocery store on Jefferson Avenue was a lifeline in the predominantly Black community. It served as the area’s lone grocery store, in a neighborhood struggling under years of historic segregation and divestment.
“We understand the important role this store plays in this community and we are committed to reopening our Jefferson avenue location in the right way at the right time, with the best in class amenities that you see in all of our stores,” Tops Friendly Markets stated in a press release in late May.
On Thursday, Tops representatives and community leaders held a prayer service and a moment of silence to honor the victims, store workers and community members affected by the shooting.
(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — When the Tops Friendly Market on Jefferson Avenue shut down after the Buffalo mass shooting, the community lost its only grocery store — a lifeline in a predominantly Black neighborhood that fought for years to obtain access to affordable and quality fresh food.
Two months after the shooting, the store is opening its doors again to the public on Friday, but the prospect of returning to the site of the massacre has been difficult for the community. With no other grocery store in the area, some have no choice.
Pastor Dwayne Jones was at his church, Mount Aaron Missionary Baptist Church, when the shooting occurred less than half a mile away. Jones, a developer who has spearheaded projects across the city to provide affordable housing to the community, said that the Tops should open only “temporarily” while they build a grocery store at a new location.
“[It] has been very traumatic to the congregation, to the community, to people — seeing those bodies come out of their Tops,” Jones said.
Ten Black people were shot and killed at the Tops by a white teenager in an alleged racially motivated shooting on May 14. The victims included four grocery store employees as well as six customers, several of them regulars at the store, according to the Buffalo Police Department and those who knew them.
Jones leads a congregation of 300 people at his church where one of the shooting victims, 63 year-old Geraldine Talley, was a member and was buried on church grounds.
“There’s a lot of fear,” Jones said. “There’s a lot of questions. Where do we go from here? How do we trust people that don’t look like us in the community? I wouldn’t say it’s healing, but it’s trying to get through the traumatic part before we get to the healing.”
Jamil Crews, a community leader and organizer who grew up in the East Buffalo neighborhood, said he understands why some don’t want to go back to the Tops and if there was another “viable option” in the community, he also wouldn’t want it to reopen.
“I saw the full video of [the shooting] – unedited, just raw, unedited, and it completely broke me,” Crews, who runs a marketing business located a few hundred feet away from the Tops, told ABC News on Wednesday.
But for many people, he said, “this is the only resource they have in that community, so they need it.”
Crews said he and some of his fraternity brothers will be at the reopening Friday to help elderly people with their groceries and send a message that “it’s safe to come back.”
Community members, store workers and Tops executives gathered on Thursday afternoon for a prayer service and a moment of silence to mark the two-month anniversary of the shooting and honor the victims ahead of the store reopening.
The company said in a statement the store “will quietly and respectfully reopen to the public.”
Regular shoppers, a retired police officer: Remembering the victims of the Buffalo shooting
Asked about relocating, Tops Friendly Markets President John Persons said at a press conference in June that it would take two to three years to do so, according to Buffalo ABC affiliate WKBW.
According to Persons, who spoke at the rededication of the store on Thursday, about 75% of the employees who worked at the Jefferson Avenue store at the time of the shooting have returned to work, which he said is “a testament to their resiliency.”
Persons said in June that employees who don’t feel comfortable returning have the option of working at other branches. According to the franchise’s website, Tops Friendly Markets operates 150 stores across Pennsylvania, Vermont and New York, with seven locations in Buffalo.
Persons also said the store will undergo extensive renovations and remodeling and when it reopens, it will have a different look and feel.
The remodeled store “will provide more space for produce, organic options, fresh foods, personal care products and, importantly, community collaborations for nutrition education and health screenings,” Persons said Thursday.
“It will become an ever greater resource to combat local food insecurity and support health and wellness,” he added.
Following the shooting, the closure of the Tops supermarket underscored the long-standing divestment in East Buffalo that led to the predominantly-Black area to become a “food desert.”
Food deserts are when households lack access to a market because they live beyond walking distance and don’t have a personal vehicle, translating to overall food insecurity, Andre Perry, senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and author of the book “Know Your Price: Valuing Black Lives and Property in America’s Black Cities,” told ABC News, adding that Black households are more than two times likely to be food insecure than the national average.
Perry attributes practices such as redlining as a key factor that contributed to the lack of food access. Redlining refers to the practice of withholding services — such as providing housing subsidies — from low-income or minority communities.
“We know that in order to get a supermarket there, there are models created largely around density, around buying power and a number of other factors that really punish poor communities, low income communities and rural communities for not having wealth,” Perry said.
He added, “When people look at black communities, there’s a dim view. Corporations don’t see the potential. They don’t see the value in Black communities, by and large. And that is certainly the case in places like Buffalo.”
Community leaders and city officials, including Buffalo Mayor Byron Brown who was a council member at the time of the store’s opening, advocated and lobbied for a supermarket. When Tops Friendly Market opened in 2003, it became a source of pride for the community.
“There was a significant effort to bring a supermarket chain to the community, but markets refused to come in and refused to provide support for the community,” Brown told ABC News, adding that he “reached out directly to supermarket chains and convinced Tops to come to the community.”
Crews said he still remembers what it was like before the Tops opened its doors when the area was a food desert, with the nearest grocery store more than 3 miles away.
Tops’ opening, he said, “was a big deal because it’s like, finally we have something where we can have access to the fresh fruits and vegetables and we don’t have to rely on like the secondhand stuff or the powdered milk.”
Following the shooting, the store was inaccessible as a crime scene in an active investigation.
While the store was closed, community leaders like Crews worked to make sure people still had access to fresh food. Advocates planned food drives across the city, buses provided free transportation to neighboring grocery stores and volunteers worked to distribute donated hot meals and groceries to East Buffalo families.
“The whole community kind of rallied together,” Crews said.
In the aftermath of the shooting, Tops Friendly Markets partnered with the National Compassion Fund to establish the Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund to provide direct financial assistance to family members of the deceased and those impacted by the tragedy. As of Thursday morning, the fund received more than $4.26 million in donations, including a $500,000 donation from Tops Markets.
Jones said his mission is to meet with city officials to advocate for a “full-sized” grocery store to be built at a new location because even before the shooting, the Tops “wasn’t good enough.”
According to Jones, the grocery store is smaller than others across the city and having only one option speaks to years of divestment, redlining and systemic racism in the predominantly Black community in East Buffalo.
Pointing to the plan to demolish Robb Elementary School — the site of the mass shooting that left 19 dead in Uvalde, Texas — Jones said he believes the city should demolish the Tops building and the site should become a memorial to those who were killed.
“They’re going to build a new school because they don’t want to send the kids or the community back into somewhere that was traumatized,” Jones said, reflecting on his own trip to Uvalde, where he met with families of the victims.
“I think we need to have that same compassion in Buffalo, New York,” he said.
(NEW YORK, NY) — Ivana Trump, the ex-wife of former President Donald Trump, has died at age 73, the family told ABC News.
The former president said she died at her home in New York City.
Ivana Trump was Donald Trump’s first wife. They had three children together: Donald Jr., Ivanka and Eric Trump.
“Our mother was an incredible woman — a force in business, a world-class athlete, a radiant beauty, and caring mother and friend,” the Trump family said in a statement.
“Ivana Trump was a survivor. She fled from communism and embraced this country. She taught her children about grit and toughness, compassion and determination,” the family said. “She will be dearly missed by her mother, her three children and ten grandchildren.”
Manhattan paramedics, responding to a call for cardiac arrest, found a 73-year-old woman in the Upper East Side apartment where Ivana Trump lived just after 12:30 p.m. Thursday, according to the FDNY. She was pronounced dead at the scene, the NYPD said.
In a statement on his platform Truth Social, the former president remembered Ivana as a “wonderful, beautiful, and amazing woman, who led a great and inspirational life.”
“Her pride and joy were her three children, Donald Jr., Ivanka, and Eric,” he wrote. “She was so proud of them, as we were all so proud of her.”
Ivana Trump, born Ivana Marie Zelníčková, grew up under communist rule in the former Czechoslovakia. She left in the 1970s and married Donald Trump in 1977.
She worked for years in Trump’s business empire as a senior executive. She was appointed CEO of Trump’s Castle, one of his hotel casinos in Atlantic City, and helped design interiors for the Grand Hyatt Hotel and Trump Tower. She also authored multiple bestselling books and created her own clothing line.
“No matter how busy I was, I had breakfast with my children every day. I sat with them at dinner every night and helped them with their homework (I loved algebra) before going out in a Versace gown to a rubber-chicken charity event,” Ivana Trump wrote in her memoir, “Raising Trump.” “The kids and I celebrated, traveled, and grieved together. Our bond was, and is, our most valuable possession.”
Ivana and Trump divorced in 1992. Their marriage dissolved amid revelations that the former president was having an affair with Marla Maples, who would become his second wife.
In a 2017 interview with ABC News’ Amy Robach, Ivana Trump said she had forgiven her former husband. She also described the formative years of raising her children with Donald Trump.
“He was a loving father, don’t get me wrong, and he was a good provider, but he was not the father which would take a stroll and go to the Central Park or go play to baseball with them or something,” she said. She added, when they “were about 18-years-old,” “he could communicate with them, because he could start to talk business with them.”
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(PHILADELPHIA, PENNSYLVANIA) — Five children, including a toddler, were wounded in two quadruple shootings that erupted overnight in Philadelphia, according to police.
At least three adults, including a woman believed to be the toddler’s mother, were critically injured in the shootings, authorities said.
The first shooting unfolded about 10:30 p.m. Tuesday in West Philadelphia, when at least one shooter opened fire on a Kia SUV occupied by two women and the two young children, Philadelphia Police Chief Inspector Scott Small said during a news conference.
Small said 10 shots were fired at the parked vehicle, critically injuring the two women in the front seat and injuring the toddler, a 2-year-old boy, sitting next to his big brother in the backseat. He said the toddler was shot in the leg, while a woman in the driver’s seat, believed to be the child’s mother, was shot in the head and critically injured.
The other woman seated in the front passenger seat was also critically wounded, Small said. He said a 26-year-old man believed to have been standing outside the vehicle when the barrage of shots were fired was hit in the leg by a bullet and taken to a hospital in critical condition.
“In this Kia, in addition to the three victims, there was a 6-year-old boy also in the backseat,” Small said. “He’s lucky since this vehicle was hit 10 times by gunfire and three of the other passengers were all struck by gunfire.”
Investigators believe that following the shooting, the driver of the SUV drove about a block before stopping, according to Small.
No arrests have been announced in the shooting and a motive was under investigation.
“We don’t know if somebody was intentionally firing shots at this vehicle or if it was hit by stray gunfire, but the vehicle clearly has 10 bullet holes in it,” Small said.
Around 2 p.m. Thursday, four children were shot in front of an apartment building in North Philadelphia, police said. The shooting occurred about two blocks from the Edgar Allan Poe national historic site.
Police officers responding to calls of numerous shots fired, found the wounded victims — a 13-year-old boy, a 14-year-old girl, a 15-year-old boy and a 16-year-old girl — in a courtyard of the apartment complex, authorities said.
Small said at least 21 shots were fired in the direction of the children, but it was unclear if they were the targets of the shootings.
The two girls were both shot in the face and were taken to a hospital in serious condition, police said. The two boys were hospitalized with non-life-threatening wounds to their legs and arms, police said.
Officers recovered a revolver at the scene, but it was not immediately clear if it was used in the shooting, police said.
The episode came as a 10 p.m. summer curfew the city recently imposed on young people under the age of 18 was in effect. The curfew was enacted by city leaders in an attempt to protect children against gun violence. But Small said two of the children were standing just outside their apartments when they were shot and two others were friends.
“They were just a few feet from the front door on the courtyard, right in front of the house where two of the victims lived,” Small said. “The other two we believe were just visiting, they were friends, when someone fired at least 21 shots in the direction of these teenagers, striking all four.”
The two shootings occurred amid a violent streak on the streets of Philadelphia, including a June 4 mass shooting that left three people dead and 11 injured in the city’s South Street entertainment district.
The Philadelphia police department’s most recent crime statistics show that as of July 10 there have been 2,233 shooting incidents in the city this year, a 6.9% increase from the same period in 2021.
As of Wednesday, the city had recorded 290 homicides, 2% fewer than at this time last year, the statistics show. Philadelphia had 562 homicides in 2021, breaking a record set in 2020.
(NEW YORK, NY) — The number of police officers who died in the line of duty decreased by over 30% over the first six months of this year compared to 2021, but the number of officers killed by gun deaths increased by nearly 20%, according to a new report released Thursday by the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund.
The numbers, part of the organization’s mid-year report on all officer fatalities, found that, so far this year, 129 federal state, tribal and local officers died in the line of duty, compared to 188 over the same time period last year.
The organization says the decrease is almost entirely due to a reduction in COVID-19 deaths but the virus continues to be the biggest killer of law enforcement in 2022, with 54 officers losing their lives because of it, compared to 98 at the same time last year.
Thirty-three officers died from gun deaths in 2022 compared to 28 during the previous year at the same time.
Sgt. Joshua Caudell, a K-9 officer with the Arkansas Department of Corrections was one of the officers shot and killed.
The family of the nine-year police officer called his death “devastating” according to local reports.
NLEOMF says the most of the gun-related deaths were carried out with handguns, and involved domestic disturbances. The month of June saw most gun violence with 12 officer deaths.
Traffic deaths, the group said, are also down 9%, while automobile crashes are up.
“Of the 31 traffic-related fatalities, 19 were automobile crashes and 1 was a motorcycle crash,” the report says. “During the same time period last year, 13 officers were killed in automobile crashes and three died in motorcycle crashes.
The 20 total crashes over the first six months of 2022 represent a 25% increase compared to 16 in the same time period in 2021.”
The report found that 53 were city officers, 41 were from sheriff’s offices and 19 were from state police agencies.
Kent Nishimura/Los Angeles Times via Getty Images, FILE
(BUFFALO, NY) — A federal grand jury returned an indictment Thursday charging the alleged Buffalo, New York, mass shooter with federal hate crimes.
Payton Gendron, 18, is accused of storming a Tops grocery store on May 14 and gunning down 10 people, all of whom were Black, in an alleged hate crime.
At one point, Gendron aimed his Bushmaster XM rifle at a white Tops employee, who was shot in the leg and injured, Attorney General Merrick Garland told reporters last month. Gendron allegedly apologized to him before continuing the attack, Garland said.
The federal hate crime charges were announced last month.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(BUCHANAN COUNTY, Va.) — Everyone has been accounted for in Buchanan County, Virginia, on Thursday after a severe storm struck the area, bringing heavy rain and flooding, officials said.
At the height of the flooding, 44 people were unaccounted for on Wednesday. Floodwaters are now receding, said authorities in Buchanan County, which sits at the borders of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.
There are no reports of deaths or injuries, the sheriff’s office said.
The flooding came after 4 to 6 inches of rain pounded the area within hours Tuesday night. Some spots reported 3 inches of rain in just 90 minutes. A frontal system stalled over the region, which can produce copious amounts of rain in a very short period of time.
The damage spreads across about 10 miles, officials said, adding that the worst impact was downstream of where several streams join together.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has declared a state of emergency.
“I want Virginians in Buchanan County to know that we are making every resource available to help those impacted by this storm. As we continue to assess the situation, I want to thank our first responders and the personnel on the ground for providing assistance with our ongoing operations,” he said in a statement.
(BUCHANAN COUNTY, Va.) — Three people remain unaccounted for in Buchanan County, Virginia, on Thursday after a severe storm struck the area, bringing heavy rain and flooding, officials said.
At the height of the flooding, 44 people were unaccounted for on Wednesday. Floodwaters are now receding, said authorities in Buchanan County, which sits at the borders of Virginia, West Virginia and Kentucky.
The declining number of unaccounted for is due to a combination of increased cellphone service and access to previously unreachable areas, Buchanan County Emergency Management Coordinator Bart Chambers told ABC News.
There are no reports of deaths or injuries, the sheriff’s office said.
The flooding came after 4 to 6 inches of rain pounded the area within hours Tuesday night. Some spots reported 3 inches of rain in just 90 minutes. A frontal system stalled over the region, which can produce copious amounts of rain in a very short period of time.
The damage spreads across about 10 miles, officials said, adding that the worst impact was downstream of where several streams join together.
Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin has declared a state of emergency.
“I want Virginians in Buchanan County to know that we are making every resource available to help those impacted by this storm. As we continue to assess the situation, I want to thank our first responders and the personnel on the ground for providing assistance with our ongoing operations,” he said in a statement.
(BUFFALO, N.Y.) — Two months after a white teenager allegedly killed 10 Black people in what authorities described as a racially motivated mass shooting, the Buffalo, New York, supermarket where the massacre occurred is set to reopen.
The store will open to the public again on Friday following a prayer service and a moment of silence scheduled on Thursday afternoon to honor the victims, store workers and community members affected by the May shooting, Tops Friendly Markets said in a statement. Tops executives, along with community members, local dignitaries and other guests are expected to be on-hand Thursday, two months to the day of the shooting, and the company said the store “will quietly and respectfully reopen to the public,” in its statement.
Thursday’s ceremony is scheduled to begin at 2:30 p.m., marking the time the mass shooting began on May 14.
The store has undergone extensive renovations to repair the damage left by the mass shooting, in which the suspected gunman fired more than 60 shots from a high-powered, AR-15-style rifle, killing people inside and outside the Jefferson Avenue store and leaving three wounded.
The store was turned back over to Tops after investigators spent five days combing through it for evidence. FBI officials said investigators used state-of-the-art, scene-scanning tools, spherical and drone photography, conducted a bullet trajectory analysis of the shooting and reconstructed the shooting while the store was declared a crime scene.
During a May 19 news conference, Tops president John Persons promised the community that the store would “open it in a respectful manner for our associates, our employees and for the community at large.”
At the time, Persons said the renovations would include some way to memorialize the victims of the shooting.
“We have been committed to the city of Buffalo since our founding 60 years ago and this event doesn’t stop that commitment,” Persons said. “We will be here. We will be in this store.”
The market has served as a vital part of the east Buffalo neighborhood, local leaders said. In the predominantly Black neighborhood, which has struggled to thrive after years of historic segregation and divestment, residents said the area’s lone grocery store has been a central resource and gathering place providing access to fresh food and medicine. One Buffalo city councilman described the store to ABC News as “an oasis in the middle of a food desert.”
Investigators said the suspected shooter, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, allegedly targeted the store after conducting reconnaissance on it for at least two months.
Gendron drove three hours from his home in Conklin, New York, a day before the shooting and allegedly spent time conducting a final reconnaissance on the store before allegedly committing the mass shooting on a Saturday afternoon.
Authorities allege Gendron stormed the store wielding a Bushmaster XM-15 .223-caliber rifle and dressed in military fatigues, body armor and wearing a tactical helmet with a camera attached. Gendron allegedly livestreamed the attack on the gaming website Twitch before the company took down the live feed two minutes into the shooting.
Among those killed was 55-year-old Aaron Salter Jr., a retired Buffalo police officer who was working as a security guard at the supermarket. Authorities said Salter fired at the gunman, but the bullets had no effect due to the bulletproof vest the suspect wore.
Gendron was indicted on 25 counts, including 10 counts of first-degree murder, 10 counts of second-degree murder as a hate crime, three counts of attempted murder as a hate crime, and one count of criminal possession of a weapon. He is also the first person in New York history charged with domestic terrorism motivated by hate, a crime enacted in November 2020.
He has pleaded not guilty to the charges and faces life in prison without the possibility of parole if convicted.
Gendron has also been charged with 26 federal counts, including 10 counts of committing a hate crime resulting in death. He has yet to enter a plea to the federal charges.
Federal prosecutors have not yet announced whether they will seek the death penalty in the case.
(NEW YORK) — Amtrak has announced an extreme heat warning for the Northeast region, signaling that trains running between New York and Philadelphia might experience delays.
“This is a typical protocol for warm summer months,” a spokesperson for Amtrak told ABC News.
High temperatures cause the rails and overhead wires to expand. The service is affected because the trains have to travel at lower speeds to avoid accidents.
A rail temperature of 131 degrees Fahrenheit, for example, requires the train to slow down to 100 mph or less, where an Amtrak train would usually travel between 125 and 150 mph.
With extreme heat also comes the risk of rails warping, which can cause train derailments, rolling black outs and subsequent service disruptions, according to Nick Bassill, a meteorologist at the University of Albany who regularly works with state governments and utility companies.
A spokesperson for the Department of Transportation wrote in an email to ABC News that “one issue that receives attention during summertime is ‘sun kink’ which is a track buckling condition that can occur during extended periods of extremely high temperatures where continuous welded rail is in use.”
A train derailment in the San Francisco bay area this May was due to “a rapid increase in ambient temperatures,” according to local transit authorities.
During the record-breaking heatwave in the Pacific Northwest last summer, in which temperatures reached 115°F, roads buckled and power cables melted. Amtrak announced delays in service during that period.
A 2019 article in the publication Transport Policy estimated that delays in the U.S. rail network due to temperature could cost between $20 and $60 billion by 2100.
Paul Chinowsky, professor in the College of Engineering at the University of Colorado Boulder, laid out three possible solutions in an interview with ABC News.
The first is upgrading the rails to be more temperature resistant, which Chinowsky said is already being enacted in Great Britain and France. In this case, the steel mix is changed to be less brittle, said Chinowsky.
The obstacle is that the United States has over 140,000 miles of rails, compared to 10,000 miles in the U.K. and 18,000 in France.
“We have started that a little bit, but not nearly at the rate that’s keeping up with the rising temperatures,” said Chinowsky.
Another option, which is already being implemented in the U.S., is a system of heat sensors which provide localized information about when and where trains need to slow down.
It enables a “more accurate analysis,” Chinowsky said, so that the train slowing could be targeted for a set number of miles and hours.
That way, “you don’t have to shut down the whole Northeast corridor,” he said.
A final opinion Chinowsky mentioned was planting trees, or using some other natural solution, to create shade. This could be implemented around train stations, Chinowsky said, although this planning is “still in the very early stage.”
“We’re not even in the worst part of the summer yet,” said Chinowsky. “So we’ll keep seeing [delays]. It’s going to get worse as we go along.”
