What The Hell America!

As the month of May approaches each year, Marnetta Malcolm is brought to tears — mourning alongside former neighbors still reeling from the racist massacre that attempted to shatter her childhood community in Buffalo, New York.

“It starts now,” Malcolm told Capital B in an interview nine days before the third anniversary of the murder of 10 people at a local supermarket. 

“Every year when calls — like you’re calling — start, it’ll trigger some,” Malcolm said. “This stuff happens every year.”

The 64-year-old thinks about her grammar school friend, Geraldine Talley, a lot. 

Talley, 62, and nine other Cold Springs residents, ranging in age from 32 to 86, were murdered on May 14, 2022, on the grounds of and inside the Tops Friendly Markets supermarket on Jefferson Avenue — just steps from Malcolm’s childhood home. 

Since the attack, residents’ hopes for a second grocery store in Buffalo’s Blackest community remain unmet. Abandoned homes still line Jefferson Avenue, and grassroots groups continue to be a main resource for essential services, including health care. Meanwhile, the convicted gunman’s case remains in the headlines as he faces a federal hate crime trial this fall, where a jury will decide whether the death penalty is a fitting punishment.

Time hasn’t helped heal in many ways. Malcolm was hundreds of miles away in Florida when she heard about the shooting. She remembers frantically calling her sister and nephew, terrified that one of them might have run an errand to that store. They were safe.

“It’s an intense time. Me, myself,” said Malcolm, her voice beginning to crack. “I’m probably suffering from a little PTSD myself.” 

Shortly after the massacre, she booked a flight and headed back to her hometown. She recalls how she went into cardiac arrest while volunteering to feed the community in the aftermath.

In the months after, in state court, the shooter pleaded guilty to 15 counts, including murder and domestic terrorism motivated by hate, and was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. The federal case carries even higher stakes: the Justice Department is pursuing the death penalty, and a judge in April denied the shooter’s motion to remove capital punishment from consideration. 

“If there’s an actual trial, I think that people will be just on edge, like they are now,” said Malcolm, who moved to Florida 11 years ago, but visits her hometown often to see family. “It isn’t them being scared. They aren’t scared, they are frustrated — it’s anger.”

“It’s like living in a matrix”

“The world had their eyes on us, and we blinked,” said Jerome R. Wright, first vice chair for VOICE Buffalo, a coalition of faith-based organizations that advocates for social justice and equity. Wright expressed frustration with both current and former elected officials over what he sees as stalled or superficial progress. 

“That’s a sad testimony,” he said.

Residents were also outraged that in April 2023 Erie County officials tried to approve a $2.5 million plan to buy land in Buffalo to build a multimillion-dollar correctional facility. 

The Rev. Diann Holt couldn’t believe that any lawmaker in Buffalo would think about building such a facility when families are being evicted and homelessness is on the rise. 

“How dare you,” Holt, a former Cold Springs resident, said at the time. “It’s almost like living in a matrix, where your expectation is that people will look at what’s real and start working on making changes to those things that beset us. And I don’t see that taking place.”

Wright, along with other community activists, attended a legislative session in April 2023 and was successful in stopping a vote to approve the new jail plan. Lawmakers changed their course of action to instead conduct a study on whether building a new facility is needed. Discussions about the jail are ongoing, Wright said. 

In the years since the shooting, Wright said he is disappointed that he cannot think of a single promised change to his community that was kept by elected officials. He also stands firm in his belief that while Tops was the neighborhood’s only source for fresh groceries, it should have been torn down just as fast as Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas. 

“Not a brick has been laid on Jefferson Avenue for another store, for a memorial or anything, but they got [millions] to build a jail to lock us up,” he echoed in an interview with Capital B two years later. The estimated budget for the new jail climbed from $250 million in 2023 to $700 million in 2024.

Wright said they lost 10 pillars of the community — grandmothers, fathers, activists. Yet instead of lasting change, he said, the community got the same grocery store rebuilt on the very spot where they were murdered — something he said that would never happen in a white suburb, but did on Buffalo’s East Side.

He was also infuriated by the idea of having a mental health center in the jail and not having one outside for residents in need. 

“We need real, actual system change” 

Holt, 75, said prior to the shooting, there were always grassroots efforts to alleviate food, health, and transportation insecurities in the community.  

But many residents say former longtime incumbent Mayor Bryon Brown and other elected officials didn’t do enough to create real systemic change. A month after the attack, New York Gov. Kathy Hochul announced a $50 million investment into the East Side of Buffalo. The governor also committed in March 2023 an additional $2.5 million to increase staff at the Buffalo United Resiliency Center – located over 3 miles away from the grocery store – that provides mental health service for the survivors and the families of those who were killed. 

Jillian Hanesworth, a Buffalo resident and 2024 Emmy-Award winning poet, said she hasn’t seen a significant change and that the East Side of Buffalo remains an eyesore, with vacant lots and abandoned homes that residents don’t own — especially along the Jefferson Avenue corridor. 

“We need real, actual system change. We need legislation,” Hanesworth said in a previous interview. “We need to be mindful about how it’s written and how it’s enforced, and unfortunately, a lot of people don’t really have a lot of faith that will happen.”

Since the shooting, attorney John V. Elmore has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the gun manufacturers and the social media platform that hosted the radicalizing content used to plan the attack. Last year, a judge denied the defendants’ motion to dismiss the case, and the decision is now being appealed. Oral arguments are scheduled before the Appellate Division of the state’s Supreme Court on May 20. Elmore represents the families of Andre Mackneil, 53; Katherine Massey, 72; and Heyward Patterson, 67, as well as 36-year-old survivor Latisha Rogers.

There have also been at least two fundraising efforts — The Buffalo Together Community Response Fund and Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund — that reportedly raised millions that went back into nonprofit organizations within the community and to the families of those who died, as well as to survivors and those who worked at or lived nearby the reopened Tops market. 

Grassroots efforts such as Holt’s — which supports expecting and new mothers with free services such as doulas and grief counseling resources — are Band-Aids to what elected officials should allocate funds toward in their community, she said in a previous interview. 

“That’s one of the things that I tell people repeatedly, that I’m working to put myself out of business. I mean, why should I exist? There should be no reason for me,” Holt previously told Capital B.

Turning tragedy into activism and advocacy

Some residents remain skeptical about any planned anniversary events hosted by elected officials. When Tops reopened, many thought it was too soon and that it should have been razed and reopened at another location. The victims’ names were also left off a memorial water wall inside the store, which offended others, and the current memorial under construction outside the store has been described as an eyesore. 

Wright said the community wanted to have a memorial park built instead, “something real that people can go [to] and learn about racism,” as well as about what happened and who the people killed were. 

“They are making a joke, a mockery of a memorial on the corner of where the store is,” he said.

Some of the victims’ and survivors’ loved ones have started organizations and gotten involved in politics. Ruth Whitfield’s sons, Raymond and Garnell Whitfield, launched a nonprofit to fight white supremacy. Zeneta Everhart, whose son Zaire Goodman survived the shooting, is running for city council to represent the Masten District — the area that includes Cold Springs. Garnell Whitfield, a former Buffalo fire commissioner, has also thrown his hat into the political ring, running for mayor after Brown resigned in October 2024 to take a new role as CEO and president of Western Regional Off-Track Betting. Buffalo Common Council President Christopher Scanlon has been serving as acting mayor, and is running for the seat. 

Wright, who is also the co-director for the HALTsolitary Campaign, and other grassroots organizations held a community forum for residents to air their grievances about being left out of discussions when it comes to changes or decisions in the community, such as when the grocery store reopened 60 days after the shooting. 

For Malcolm, it’s not about the anniversary, but about strengthening neighborhood bonds. 

“There’s all this attention that lasts until midnight on the 14th — and right after all the … whatever it is, the honoring that they do — then there’s this huge empty vacuum, a void,” Malcolm said.

On the first anniversary of the massacre, she wanted to uplift the community. So she organized the first Friday Night Live series on behalf of the Buffalo Funk Fest Foundation. Held every Friday during the summer just a block from the crime scene on Jefferson Avenue, the event offers a space for the community to heal through music, food, local vendors, and access to mental health resources.

“I have been on fire for my community … because everybody’s suffering from PTSD now,” Malcolm said, adding, “Friday Night Live lifts — it brings hope, and renaissance, spirit, and love back to the community.”