One year ago, Brooklyn Hough was a cashier at Tops Friendly Market, located on Buffalo’s east side. She was 22 years old and working to support her two children. Hough was just going out for her lunch break on a typical, quiet Saturday.
Then Payton Gendron arrived at the store. He carried out a racist shooting spree that would shock the nation and traumatize the city.
Hough heard gunshots and then screaming. At first, she thought the store was getting robbed. She fled through the back of the store.
“I did not see the killing, but I did see the bodies,” Hough told HuffPost.
She tried to call her boyfriend but his phone was dead, so she called her mother. Her mother could hear other people screaming, too.
Gendron murdered 10 Black people and injured three others. In his 180-page manifesto, the 18-year-old said he was fighting back against the “Great Replacement,” a dangerous white supremacist ideology that claims the government and Democrats are deliberately replacing ethnic Europeans with non-Europeans to gain political and cultural advantage.
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