Buffalo, N.Y. (WBEN) - After a heavy, emotional day for the community Monday, in which the alleged Tops shooter entered a plea of guilty to 15 charges, including domestic terrorism and 10 counts of murder, Erie County District Attorney John Flynn had a chance to exhale on WBEN Tuesday morning.
No audio or video was allowed in the courtroom for the highly anticipated hearing.
"We strenuously argued for cameras to be allowed," said Flynn. "Defense attorneys objected to it. They did not want cameras." Judge Susan Eagan ruled with the defense and did not allow them.
Much has been made by family members of victims of the shooting about Payton Gendron's cleaned-up appearance.
"When he walked in, the first thing we said to each other was, 'Wow, they cleaned him up. He got a haircut, he looks like this little 18-year-old child," said Zeneta Everhart, mother of Zaire Goodman, one of three people wounded in the mass shooting. "But that's how America treats young white men. We keep them that way. We show them in a way that doesn't make them look threatening, and it's disgusting. If that were my son, if that was Zaire, pictures of him would have been in a hoodie. That's how we project Black men in this country, and we clean up our young white kids."
Flynn said the cleaned-up look is a common practice that defense lawyers do with their clients. "They clean them up. They bring them into court to look presentable. It's just a tactic that defense teams do in pretty much every case," he said.
Understanding that the public did not get a chance to see Gendron, Flynn said he is well aware of comments that the defendant looked like a sympathetic little boy. "Please," he said. "Do not have any sympathy for him at all. He is a little monster who deserves to be in jail for the rest of his life. And that's where he'll be."
Flynn, in describing what happened in the courtroom, explained why it was important to him to read each of the ten separate murder charges, ending each one with the words, "because they were African American." Flynn was disappointed that there were no cameras in the court. "I believed that the public and the community needed to see justice being done here. The fact that there were no cameras, I felt I had an obligation to the community and the world to let everyone know what this racist murderer did. I met with many family members before the guilty plea and I told them that there would be no cameras and that I was going to go through what the proof would have been at trial so that the community could hear it. There were no objections at all and they were prepared for it," added Flynn.
