Buffalo shooting aftermath: Long Islanders respond

Long Islanders responded to the deadly Buffalo shooting over the weekend with heartbreak, anger and calls to root out racism and gun violence.

“It hits close to home and calls my heart to bleed,” said Rev. Tristan J. Salley, senior pastor at St. Paul AME Church in Rockville Centre, during the Sunday service.

Salley said he lived in the Buffalo area for over three years and frequently shopped in the grocery store where a white 18-year-old opened fire Saturday afternoon. Ten people were killed and three more were wounded.

Of those shot, 11 were Black and two were white. The victims included shoppers and a retired police officer who worked at the supermarket as a security guard.

Police have said the attack was motivated by racial hatred and called it a hate crime.

The suspected gunman, who was taken into custody on Saturday, drove 200 miles from Conklin in Broome County, where he lives, to the Tops Friendly Markets store in a predominantly Black neighborhood in Buffalo.

Salley called the massacre “a tragedy that beset a community that was already grappling with hurt and fears on every leaning side.”

“We’re dealing at a time, facing the world head on when the world seems to continue to box people of brown and Black colors into a corner,” Salley said. “We are dealing in the face of this adversity trying to get a word from God so that we may be encouraged in mind, body and spirit not only to make it through the week but, if we can be honest, just to make it from hour to hour.”

Gov. Kathy Hochul, a Buffalo native, called the shooting “white supremacy terrorism.”

“It's racism. It’s hatred, and it stops right here in Buffalo,” she said during a press conference on Sunday. “This is the last stop you're going to have because we are coming after you.”

Tracey Edwards, director of the Long Island NAACP, said the next steps must get at the root of domestic terrorism so that such violence is not repeated in another store or another community.

“People must be able to live their lives without being subjected to terrorism,” she said. “All of us across the country really must come together and address background checks, automatic weapons and domestic terrorism.”

The Buffalo attack reminded Dawn Littles, a social worker who works in Brooklyn and lives in Suffolk County, of the shooting at the Mother Emanuel AME church in Charleston, South Carolina, where a white man, then 21, killed nine Black people.

“It was very devastating,” she said. “In the lens of intersectionality, as a woman, you have to think about being sexually harassed. As a Black person, or a person of color, you have to think about racially motivated crime or prejudice. It's just a lot to think about.”

Littles said she feels she needs to be even more on alert in public.

“We are trying to protect ourselves from the pandemic as well as protecting ourselves from the other dangers outside, like apparently getting shot at a grocery store,” Littles said. “It's just scary.”

Jasmine Cross, a mother of two in Valley Stream, said what happened in Buffalo heightened her sense of alarm.

“I've always been very aware of my surroundings,” she said. “I have to teach my [daughters] how to be aware of [their] surroundings as well because anything can happen at any moment while you're [at] some place.”

The fact that the shooting rampage took place at a grocery store hit particularly hard given the basic human needs for food and security, said Don Sinkfield, a therapist in Valley Stream.

“Food, clothing, shelter and safety is right at the root of what all of us need. It’s the common denominator of being a human being,” he said. “It really takes away that ability just to feel OK in your own skin.”

Pastor Brandon Karl Allen of the Bethel AME Church in Bay Shore called for his congregation to pray for a “community shattered by gun violence.”

He urged churchgoers to remember that the Scriptures teach people to love one another, though he acknowledged it is “hard to love the enemy sometimes in the midst of all we see.”

“The world we live in is filled with so much hatred,” he said during the service on Sunday. “We are not called to add to that hatred. We are called to love one another. We are called to show acts of kindness every day.”

There are no specific threats locally, but the Nassau and Suffolk police departments said they would remain vigilant in the coming days.

“We will be upping our patrols in all of our churches, all of our houses of worship,” Nassau County Police Commissioner Patrick Ryder said in a news conference on Sunday. “We will be making sure that people come and pray in peace.”

Suffolk police wrote in an emailed statement Sunday: “While there are currently no credible threats in Suffolk County, the SCPD is monitoring the ongoing investigation and adjusting patrols accordingly.”

With AP