Speaker 1: You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a
Speaker 1: production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.
Speaker 2: In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom
Speaker 2: to reshape the law. The brave men and women who
Speaker 2: investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select
Speaker 2: group that is defined American history. These are their stories.
Speaker 2: May fourteenth, twenty twenty two, two thirty pm, Buffalo, New York.
Speaker 1: The hum of a Saturday afternoon at Top's Friendly Supermarket,
Speaker 1: shopping carts rolling across pavement, families moving through the aisles.
Speaker 3: Then screams, we are following reports of a mass shooting
Speaker 3: at Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Police say there
Speaker 3: are are quote multiple victims, but other details are scarce
Speaker 3: and there is still a large police presence on sceen.
Speaker 1: Gunfire echoed through the store. Each shot ricocheted off tailand steel.
Speaker 1: Customers ducked behind shelves, workers pressed themselves flat against the floor.
Speaker 1: In less than five minutes, ten lives were gone, and
Speaker 1: across the city's East side, words spread at lightning speed
Speaker 1: phones rang as sirens wailed. What had begun as an
Speaker 1: ordinary trip for groceries had become a community's darkest hour.
Speaker 4: When I first saw him shooting, he shot a woman,
Speaker 4: he shot a deacon, he shot another woman, and then
Speaker 4: he went in the store and started shooting again.
Speaker 5: So I don't know who he was shooting at because
Speaker 5: he shot at least eight eight people.
Speaker 6: So he came feel safe in your own neighborhood. People
Speaker 6: come over here.
Speaker 5: What are we suits on shooting people?
Speaker 6: This is what DULs.
Speaker 5: I got a call. Get out to LaGuardia Airport. There's
Speaker 5: been a bombing. There was a thirty two foot crater
Speaker 5: in front of what was left of the building.
Speaker 7: I was trying to figure out, am I dead? Am
Speaker 7: I alive? Where am I?
Speaker 1: I'm Aniseega Nicolazi.
Speaker 5: That's why terrorism works. It doesn't care who you are.
Speaker 1: From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order,
Speaker 1: criminal justice system. Buffalo, New York, sits on the edge
Speaker 1: of Lake Erie, where the water meets the city's skyline.
Speaker 1: Its streets stretch outward into old steel towns and quiet neighborhoods.
Speaker 1: It's a place shaped by industry and weather, known for
Speaker 1: its resilience as much as for its long winters. But
Speaker 1: beneath the surface, Buffalo is also a city marked by
Speaker 1: deep divides between its west side and its east side,
Speaker 1: between privilege and poverty. It's also the place where Garnell
Speaker 1: Whitfield grew up then served his community for over three decades.
Speaker 5: I was a Commissioner of Fire, an emergency management for
Speaker 5: the city of Buffalo, and did thirty four years with
Speaker 5: the fire Department.
Speaker 1: Garnell knows the city like the back of his hand.
Speaker 1: On the east side sat a single supermarket known as Tops.
Speaker 1: It stood on Jefferson Avenue, on a street that used
Speaker 1: to be a thriving corridor for black businesses, but has
Speaker 1: since endured decades of disinvestment. It was a rare anchor
Speaker 1: in a neighborhood long abandoned.
Speaker 5: Tops is the only market on the east side of Buffalo.
Speaker 5: It's a food desert where eighty ninety percent of people
Speaker 5: of color live in Buffalo, New York.
Speaker 1: For thousands of families. This carried meaning far greater than
Speaker 1: it's square footage.
Speaker 5: It's a lifeline, yeah, I mean prescriptions whatever. It is
Speaker 5: just a place that fellowship and meet. It's a place
Speaker 5: of community. That's what it is, and it's in the
Speaker 5: heart of the East side of Buffalo.
Speaker 1: It was a steady presence in a part of the
Speaker 1: city where so much else had been stripped away.
Speaker 5: There's a lot of things about Buffalo, and it's a
Speaker 5: former steel town. That industry is no longer in existence,
Speaker 5: and so Buffalo has suffered for years. Buffalo is a
Speaker 5: very poor city. It is at this particular moment, I think,
Speaker 5: one of the sixth poor city in America, the sixth
Speaker 5: most racially divided city in America for city its size.
Speaker 5: It's one of the only cities in America of its
Speaker 5: size that does not have a minority suburb.
Speaker 1: Those conditions weren't foreign to him. He'd known them since
Speaker 1: he was a child.
Speaker 5: We've been in Buffalo my entire life. I remember being
Speaker 5: very poor. My father, I think, made fifty dollars a
Speaker 5: week working at one of the local stores. And we
Speaker 5: lived in the projects. I mean, we grew up in
Speaker 5: the projects. But my mom never let the projects grow
Speaker 5: in us, you know what I'm saying.
Speaker 1: At the center was his mother, Ruth. She was the
Speaker 1: one who lifted the family up, refusing to let circumstances
Speaker 1: to find them.
Speaker 5: She was very proud of her family. She was very proud,
Speaker 5: even though sometimes maybe she shouldn't have because we weren't
Speaker 5: all I know. I caused her some consternation, but she
Speaker 5: loved her family. She was married to my dad for
Speaker 5: sixty eight years.
Speaker 1: All truism shaped her life. She spent years caring for
Speaker 1: the elderly, and even in her own retirement, she continued
Speaker 1: to look after others.
Speaker 5: Here's somebody who would bring strangers home, Somebody who would
Speaker 5: visit the other people in the nursing home, no matter
Speaker 5: what color they are. Somebody who was kind, somebody who
Speaker 5: was loving, Somebody who believed in God and believed in
Speaker 5: advocating for them least of these. That's who she was.
Speaker 1: By the spring of twenty twenty two, Ruth was eighty six.
Speaker 1: That Mother's Day, Garnell decided to do something special.
Speaker 5: I had taken on a project of building her a
Speaker 5: raised garden planter. She'd liked to grow fruits and vegetables
Speaker 5: or whatever, and she had terrible back issues and could
Speaker 5: not really tend to soil and bend over and do
Speaker 5: that kind of thing anymore. So she could never buy
Speaker 5: her anything. She'd had to buy it for herself. So
Speaker 5: we had gotten used to giving her money. But I
Speaker 5: wanted to do something more personal. This particular Mother's Day,
Speaker 5: so I decided to build her raised planter and give
Speaker 5: her money. So I had taken that project on and
Speaker 5: wasn't able to complete it for Mother's Day to weather
Speaker 5: that hadn't go operated, and I had to travel and
Speaker 5: other things. But I'm out here on May thirteenth, and
Speaker 5: I spent the entire day with her. It was extremely
Speaker 5: warm that day, and she sat out in the yard,
Speaker 5: we talked, and we had a wonderful day.
Speaker 1: By late afternoon, the planter was in place, the soil leveled,
Speaker 1: and the work nearly finished. It was time to wrap up, so.
Speaker 5: I left her exactly a quarter to three on five
Speaker 5: point thirteen. I said, I'm going to come back in
Speaker 5: the morning and put some more dirt and raise the
Speaker 5: level up even higher. You don't have to bend over
Speaker 5: as much, and it's ready for planting. And she says
Speaker 5: she was going to go get some seeds and we
Speaker 5: were going to meet the next day.
Speaker 1: The next morning, Garnell made good on his promise that
Speaker 1: brought over dirt.
Speaker 5: I put it in, knocked on the door, she didn't answer.
Speaker 5: She needed to wear hearing age, and half the time
Speaker 5: didn't wear them, and I didn't know if she just
Speaker 5: didn't hear me, or she was resting, because she did
Speaker 5: not sleep much at all. She was waiting on a
Speaker 5: nerve block injection for her back and was in dire pain.
Speaker 5: So I didn't want to disturb her, so I said,
Speaker 5: I'll cut your at the nursing home. So I left.
Speaker 5: I never saw her again.
Speaker 1: The rest of that morning passed quietly. Garnell ran a
Speaker 1: few errands with his wife. They were driving home when
Speaker 1: the phone rang.
Speaker 5: My sister in law caught and said that something had
Speaker 5: occurred at Tops. Had we heard? And I said no,
Speaker 5: we hadn't heard. We came back home and tried to
Speaker 5: find out what was going on. There was no news,
Speaker 5: there was nothing on the TV.
Speaker 1: He picked up the phone again, this time to call
Speaker 1: his mother.
Speaker 5: So I called my mom just to check on her.
Speaker 5: I hadn't seen her that morning. She didn't answer. My
Speaker 5: wife called her sister and she didn't answer.
Speaker 1: The silence wasn't settling. The television soon broadcast the breaking news.
Speaker 5: Eventually, maybe fifteen twenty minutes, ribbon started coming across the
Speaker 5: bottom of the TV, not with any real specific information,
Speaker 5: but it's something that had occurred at Tops.
Speaker 8: We're following the letters on that mass shooting in our country,
Speaker 8: reports so that eight people had been killed. Reports say
Speaker 8: the gunman issued some type of manifesto, that the attack
Speaker 8: appears to be targeted, not yet confirmed though by authorities.
Speaker 1: With a new sense of urgent. See. Garnell was intent
Speaker 1: on reaching his mom, and.
Speaker 5: So I called my mom again and she didn't answer.
Speaker 5: And then I waited a few minutes, and I told
Speaker 5: my wife. I said, I'm going to go check on
Speaker 5: my mom.
Speaker 1: As he drove, his mind kept circling back to the
Speaker 1: unanswered calls. He stopped by her house, the car wasn't there.
Speaker 1: He called again, still no answer. Something pulled him toward
Speaker 1: Jefferson Avenue.
Speaker 5: I know all of those people that responded, FBI, atf
Speaker 5: Buffalo Police, Fire, Erie County, all of those people I've
Speaker 5: worked with down to the year, so I know them
Speaker 5: all personally. I couldn't find my mother. I was hoping
Speaker 5: that I knew where she was, and something led me
Speaker 5: to go by Tops. So I just showed up over
Speaker 5: there at Tops.
Speaker 1: What he founded the market was mayhem.
Speaker 5: It was chaotic, it was a shooting, no definitive information,
Speaker 5: There was no specifics or anything. There was a shooting.
Speaker 1: In a matter of hours, his calm morning had turned
Speaker 1: to panic, and at the center of it all was
Speaker 1: the rock of his community.
Speaker 5: When the public had started to gather, when there were victims,
Speaker 5: I mean, it was tragic scene.
Speaker 1: Every direction was noise and confusion. But his garnell edged closer,
Speaker 1: his focus narrowed. He was looking for something specific.
Speaker 5: I decided to see if my mother's car was there.
Speaker 5: I don't know why, but I started walking the perimeter,
Speaker 5: trying to ascertain whether, in fact I saw her car.
Speaker 5: They had it all roped off of the parking lot.
Speaker 1: The barricades blocked his view. He strained to see through
Speaker 1: the maze of yellow tape and police.
Speaker 5: As I approached the Jefferson Street side of the parking lot,
Speaker 5: I was able to just see just a faint, small
Speaker 5: part of the hood of a black vehicle. And it
Speaker 5: was in the handicaps spot, right up by the store,
Speaker 5: which is where my mother would have absolutely parked as
Speaker 5: close as she could, and the handicaps having the back.
Speaker 1: Issues in that His thoughts began to race as his
Speaker 1: chest tightened.
Speaker 5: I couldn't see the car. I got a detective. I
Speaker 5: described the car to him, got a detective to go
Speaker 5: into the scene and to identify the car, and that's
Speaker 5: how I found out that she was there.
Speaker 1: For Garnell. It was a moment suspended between hope and dread.
Speaker 1: Was his mother among the victims? Had she made it
Speaker 1: out alive? The only way to know was to keep searching.
Speaker 1: As he looked for answers outside the store, the police
Speaker 1: response continued to build. At the top of that chain
Speaker 1: of command was the city's police commissioner.
Speaker 4: My name is Joe Grimalia. I retired at the end
Speaker 4: of January of twenty twenty five. I was the commissioner
Speaker 4: for almost three years. Before that, I was a deputy
Speaker 4: commissioner and district chief. Before that, I was a homicide commander.
Speaker 4: That was a career Buffalo officer.
Speaker 1: He knows its officers, its streets, and it struggles. Service
Speaker 1: ran through his family and for Joe, it had always
Speaker 1: been more than a job.
Speaker 4: I like to say it's the family business. My father
Speaker 4: was a New York State trooper, my uncles were local officers,
Speaker 4: my cousins.
Speaker 6: It's deep in the family roots.
Speaker 4: I always idolized the profession and it was very singularly
Speaker 4: tracked that that's what I wanted to do.
Speaker 1: But on the afternoon of May fourteenth, his experience and
Speaker 1: leadership were about to be tested in new ways. When
Speaker 1: the call first came in, he drove faster than he
Speaker 1: ever had before.
Speaker 4: I don't live that far away, probably twelve to fifteen
Speaker 4: minutes of normal driving. I think I got there in
Speaker 4: about seven minutes.
Speaker 1: Dispatcher calls kept coming through his radio. With every update,
Speaker 1: the numbers grew.
Speaker 4: When I got Onseene, the gravity of the situation really
Speaker 4: hit me.
Speaker 1: By two thirty six that afternoon, when Joe arrived, the gunman,
Speaker 1: an eighteen year old named Peyton Grendon, was already in handcuffs.
Speaker 4: When the first call went out. We had three police
Speaker 4: officers in that parking lot, and I think it was
Speaker 4: about sixty four seconds from the time the nine to
Speaker 4: one one call went out, and the fourth police officer
Speaker 4: got into that parking lot just the mere seconds after that.
Speaker 4: They were able to get him into custody, got him
Speaker 4: in a car, and got him out of there very
Speaker 4: very quickly.
Speaker 1: But even with a shooter apprehended, it wasn't clear if
Speaker 1: the danger was over. The first priority was to eliminate
Speaker 1: the possibility of a second shooter. Officers entered the store
Speaker 1: and carefully walked his aisles, not knowing if another gunman
Speaker 1: was waiting. Step by step, they moved in deeper. There
Speaker 1: were frightened choppers crouched behind shelves. Then the scope of
Speaker 1: the horror revealed itself, one victim, then another. The numbers
Speaker 1: continued to grow. Bodies lay motionless across the floor, some
Speaker 1: gravely injured and others already gone.
Speaker 4: Our officers clearing the store once they were satisfied that
Speaker 4: there was no other shooters, no other danger in the store.
Speaker 4: Then you start looking at victims and the firefighters are
Speaker 4: going through, and it was very obvious that anyone else
Speaker 4: that had been shot in the store was an obvious
Speaker 4: fatal wound. The officer is as tough as this is.
Speaker 4: They have to advance past the wounded, They have to
Speaker 4: advance past everybody to make sure that there's nobody else
Speaker 4: causing harm in the store. If you stop and you
Speaker 4: try to tend to a victim, more people could end
Speaker 4: up getting shot and end up suffering. So the officers,
Speaker 4: as difficult as it was, they had to keep pushing
Speaker 4: through until they cleared that store. And then you go
Speaker 4: back and start tending to the victims.
Speaker 1: Firefighters stood by, ready to follow as soon as the
Speaker 1: path was clear. Once police confirmed that the store was
Speaker 1: saved to enter, firefighters served forward, turning their focus to
Speaker 1: the wounded.
Speaker 4: They ran into the store and two of the surviving
Speaker 4: victims were inside the store. One of the surviving victims
Speaker 4: was outside the store, and they actually used a shopping
Speaker 4: cart to load the store manager into a shopping cart
Speaker 4: and push that cart out and got them evacuated from
Speaker 4: the store immediately and got him in an ambulance and
Speaker 4: got him out of there.
Speaker 1: By the time Joe arrived, rescue efforts were already underway.
Speaker 4: I was met by one of the command officers that
Speaker 4: just was shaking his head and trying to give me
Speaker 4: the rundown of what exactly was going on, And one
Speaker 4: of our veteran, seasoned homicide detectives said, come on, let
Speaker 4: me walk you through the scene.
Speaker 1: He passed bodies still lying in the parking lot. Everywhere
Speaker 1: he looked were signs of panic and violence, frozen in place.
Speaker 4: And walking around the store. It's something you'll just never unsee.
Speaker 1: Every aisle showed signs of the devastation. As he walked through,
Speaker 1: the horror light music filled the store.
Speaker 4: The in store music system was still playing, and it
Speaker 4: was early quiet in there.
Speaker 1: An uncomfortable reminder of an ordinary day shattered in an instant.
Speaker 1: Shopping cards were overturned, shelves were left scattered, and officers,
Speaker 1: some of them barely holding it together.
Speaker 4: As I was walking up, I remember some things very vividly,
Speaker 4: and one of those was an officer that was just
Speaker 4: completely overcome with emotion, and another officer was escorting him
Speaker 4: out of the store and taking him away from the scene.
Speaker 1: The scene was difficult even for seasoned officers. The obvious
Speaker 1: violence was brutal, but there was also something else that
Speaker 1: made this hit close to home.
Speaker 4: One of the victims that we lost, Aaron Salter, was
Speaker 4: a former Buffalo Police officer. He'd been retired for several years.
Speaker 4: He retired in two thousand eighteen, and there were numerous
Speaker 4: officers on scene that knew him.
Speaker 1: Many officers knew the victims, some had worked alongside Aaron Salter.
Speaker 1: The images inside that store would not fait easily.
Speaker 4: Our peer team was contacted almost immediately to get members,
Speaker 4: and they're an all volunteer peer team.
Speaker 6: To look out for our.
Speaker 1: Members, Counselors waited in the parking lot, meeting officers as
Speaker 1: they came out to ensure they were ready to keep going.
Speaker 4: This is where I think police officers can sometimes be
Speaker 4: looked at differently. But we've got a job to do,
Speaker 4: and there's not to say that we're not human and
Speaker 4: officers aren't going to go through the various stages of
Speaker 4: emotion at the time, But you've got to maintain some
Speaker 4: control and I had a job to do, so I
Speaker 4: kind of had to snap myself into shape like every
Speaker 4: other officer on scene there, and we had to start
Speaker 4: working through that.
Speaker 1: Joan needed to focus. There was still a city to
Speaker 1: comfort and keep under control. There was also the crime
Speaker 1: scene to manage, and a public waiting desperately for answers.
Speaker 1: A command post was set up across the street. The
Speaker 1: mayor and the FBI arrived. Within an hour, Jefferson Avenue
Speaker 1: had become the center of national attention. Reporters swarmed. Joe
Speaker 1: had to carve out a space where investigators could focus
Speaker 1: on what needed to be done as the outside world watched.
Speaker 4: There was a kind of a vacant parking lot across
Speaker 4: the street from this location, and we established this as
Speaker 4: our command post.
Speaker 1: The crowd was swelling, the parking lot was sealed, tensions
Speaker 1: were rising. That's when the two men finally came face
Speaker 1: to face.
Speaker 4: While I'm in that command post, the former Buffalo Fire
Speaker 4: Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, he came walking up to me. I said, hey, Garnell,
Speaker 4: he's like Joe, He's like, can you tell me if
Speaker 4: my mother's in the store. And that was like a
Speaker 4: gut punch, like froze, and I said, Garnel, I don't know.
Speaker 4: We don't have any of the identities of anybody that's
Speaker 4: in the story yet, but I said, look, stay here
Speaker 4: at the command bus, and as soon as I hear something,
Speaker 4: I'll let you know, but stay here. Come to find
Speaker 4: out that his mother was the oldest victim that was
Speaker 4: inside the store.
Speaker 1: For Garnell, the encounterset in motion of frantic search.
Speaker 5: I still didn't know whether she had been shot or
Speaker 5: anything like that. So I talked to Joe Grimaudia. He
Speaker 5: assigned a lieutenant to me. Because they had evacuated maybe
Speaker 5: twenty five people from the store and taken them to
Speaker 5: police headquarters to debrief them. They did not have a
Speaker 5: list of names of those people, and so I went
Speaker 5: about to businesses, trying to ascertain whether, in fact, my
Speaker 5: mom was one of the persons who had been evacuated.
Speaker 1: Hours passed without answers.
Speaker 5: They hadn't locked the names of the people and had
Speaker 5: made them available, so it was tough getting any information
Speaker 5: from them.
Speaker 1: Garnell had to find another way.
Speaker 5: I got another detective. I asked him to go in
Speaker 5: and look and see if my mother was there. He
Speaker 5: needed a description of her. I had not seen her
Speaker 5: that morning, so I did not know what she had on,
Speaker 5: and I did not have a picture of her readily available.
Speaker 5: I didn't even think to look through my phone. So
Speaker 5: I called the nursing home. I got them to send
Speaker 5: me the video tape of the visitors from that morning.
Speaker 5: I knew my mom had gone to the nursing home,
Speaker 5: and so I got them to send the video to me.
Speaker 5: I gave that to the detective.
Speaker 1: And then came the silence, the kind every first responder
Speaker 1: knows too well.
Speaker 5: When he didn't come back. I knew, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying. I mean, I knew I've done this a
Speaker 5: number of times myself, so I knew right away. And
Speaker 5: so with something he passed to the commissioner and to
Speaker 5: the others, people of the authority who were my peers.
Speaker 5: They gathered, and I had already set myself apart and
Speaker 5: was grieving. I knew exactly what was going on, and
Speaker 5: so they all came, Mayor and county exact and ology's people,
Speaker 5: they all came. But I already knew. I mean, I've
Speaker 5: been on the other side this for a long time,
Speaker 5: so being on this side of it as a victim,
Speaker 5: as someone looking for answers, was very different, I gotta say.
Speaker 1: As Garneld Whitfield reeled from the news that his mother Ruth,
Speaker 1: was among the victims, the shock was also settling over
Speaker 1: the entire city. When the numbers were finally confirmed, the
Speaker 1: scale of the loss was overwhelming.
Speaker 6: Ten died, three survived.
Speaker 1: It was a massacre carried out with strategic planning, then
Speaker 1: broadcast live on the Internet as it unfolded. That choice
Speaker 1: was delivered bread a way to spread terror beyond Buffalo.
Speaker 1: As soon as law enforcement realized what was happening, the
Speaker 1: stream was taken down, but by then the damage was done.
Speaker 1: The images had already escaped into the world. The toll
Speaker 1: weight heaviest on the community. It had so deliberately targeted.
Speaker 4: Eleven of the victims were black and two were white.
Speaker 4: One of the victims that was shot was in the
Speaker 4: pharmacy area and I guess was hit by a stray
Speaker 4: round if you will, suffered a grazing wound and was
Speaker 4: very fortunate. The other was the store manager. You had
Speaker 4: one woman there, one of the oldest victims, buying seeds
Speaker 4: for her garden. Springtime time to start getting gardens ready.
Speaker 1: That woman was Garnell's mom.
Speaker 4: You had other people that were there, obviously just getting
Speaker 4: their groceries. You had a victim that was working in
Speaker 4: the store that was the security guard, our former officer.
Speaker 4: You had one individual that was there buying a birthday
Speaker 4: cake for his three year old son.
Speaker 1: The crowd around the market was growing by the hour.
Speaker 4: The officers on scene were doing a tremendous job. They
Speaker 4: had the entire parking lot taped off, and what I
Speaker 4: saw was probably a couple hundred people on the outskirts
Speaker 4: of the parking lot, with more people starting to gather.
Speaker 4: One of the things that went through my mind immediately
Speaker 4: is this could be trouble. Did we have appropriate manpower
Speaker 4: in the event that people were going to start rushing
Speaker 4: the parking lot, and where emotions going to get the
Speaker 4: best of people. These are the type of valid thoughts
Speaker 4: that police officers have to think of.
Speaker 1: For a moment. The question was whether raw grief might
Speaker 1: turn sorrow into unrest.
Speaker 4: There was none of that. I said this time and
Speaker 4: time again in interviews, in both local and national interviews,
Speaker 4: that the one thing that I saw is that we
Speaker 4: we were all in this together. We suffered a loss,
Speaker 4: the community suffered a loss. Obviously the family members suffered
Speaker 4: the biggest loss. But it's like everybody was in this together.
Speaker 4: And I saw instances of our officers hugging and comforting
Speaker 4: people on the other side of the crime scene tape.
Speaker 4: And I saw people in the community hugging and comforting
Speaker 4: our officers on their side of the crime scene tape.
Speaker 1: Media trucks continued to roll in with their satellite dishes
Speaker 1: aimed at the sky.
Speaker 4: At the end of the night, we moved the command
Speaker 4: posts inside the parking lot. I totally underestimated the speed
Speaker 4: of the national media. Full studios were set up in
Speaker 4: that parking lot.
Speaker 1: At the same time, investigators were uncovering details about the
Speaker 1: gunmen and looking for the motivation for his savagery.
Speaker 4: Right off the bat, it was told that this was
Speaker 4: a racially motivated shooting because the weapons had writings all
Speaker 4: over them that identify with white supremacy replacement theory had
Speaker 4: the names of other shooters, other people that identified similarly
Speaker 4: with this shooter, So it was immediately known. There was
Speaker 4: no mistaking what the motive of this was. He's a
Speaker 4: young white male. You can look at the number of victims.
Speaker 4: Eleven of the thirteen were African American. You had two
Speaker 4: that were white. But the more we watched the video
Speaker 4: and the more we looked through to see, it was
Speaker 4: glaring what this was.
Speaker 1: In the chaos and pain of that first evening, the
Speaker 1: city still had to face the cameras and.
Speaker 4: We had our first press conference at about five point
Speaker 4: thirty three hours after the shooting, and the mayor and
Speaker 4: myself called it for what it was. And I think
Speaker 4: that's something that the community has come to appreciate. And
Speaker 4: it's not because I'm saying that, it's because I've been
Speaker 4: told that numerous times. That we called it for what
Speaker 4: it was immediately at the first press conference, that this
Speaker 4: was a race motivated hate crime.
Speaker 9: Let's be clear, this was an act of domestic terrorism
Speaker 9: motivated by hateful and perverse ideology that terrors at the
Speaker 9: soul of our nation. All Americans should reject the hateful
Speaker 9: lies that pit one race against another.
Speaker 1: While city leaders were revealing the bigotry that motivated the attack,
Speaker 1: Garnell was left to bring the grim news back to
Speaker 1: his family.
Speaker 5: My children work for the fire department, not all of them,
Speaker 5: but some of them do. My daughters were dispatchers on
Speaker 5: five fourteen. On that day, I had to call and
Speaker 5: get them relieve the duty.
Speaker 1: The Whitfield family began assembling from far and wide.
Speaker 5: I had to immediately start thinking about the rest of
Speaker 5: my family. My brother's down in Florida. He just ran
Speaker 5: straight to the airport and jumped on a flight and
Speaker 5: left everything unsettled.
Speaker 1: Even as his own grief set in, Garnell was able
Speaker 1: to remain level headed.
Speaker 5: I mean, that's what I'm trained to do, or the compartmentalized,
Speaker 5: or do whatever, and to focus on the mission. So
Speaker 5: that's my training, that's what I've always done, and actually
Speaker 5: that's what I'm still doing, you know.
Speaker 1: But no training could block the reality. This wasn't someone
Speaker 1: else's tragedy, this was his own.
Speaker 5: Right then, it was about my family, you know what
Speaker 5: I'm saying, making sure my family was okay, Because, like
Speaker 5: I say, I've seen a lot of things, have been
Speaker 5: exposed to death and tragedy, and have always been present
Speaker 5: at times like this in other people's lives, So I
Speaker 5: kind of knew what they would be going through, what
Speaker 5: they would be, you know, what would be happening with them,
Speaker 5: So that had to be the focus. You know, wasn't
Speaker 5: really time to grief, wasn't really time to process all
Speaker 5: of that. You know, It's like, what do we have
Speaker 5: to do now? How do we get through this? How
Speaker 5: do we make sure the rest of them are okay?
Speaker 1: The crime soon drew in departments from outside the city,
Speaker 1: so there.
Speaker 4: Were three agencies that were involved in this. You've got
Speaker 4: the homicide investigation, so our homicide detectors are going to
Speaker 4: do their scene processing and they're going to investigate the
Speaker 4: homicides for presentation to the local district attorney. But now
Speaker 4: you've got the FBI, who was immediately unseene that we're
Speaker 4: going to take over the racially motivated hate crime terrorism
Speaker 4: side of the investigation, and the New York State Police.
Speaker 1: The agencies worked together, digging deeper into the government. They
Speaker 1: needed to figure out if he'd been acting alone.
Speaker 4: From the federal side, which we were deeply involved with,
Speaker 4: you have to make sure that there's nobody else out there.
Speaker 4: Was he a loone actor, did he have help? Did
Speaker 4: he have anybody else? Is there going to be anybody
Speaker 4: else doing any other acts of violence anywhere else? Hence
Speaker 4: the reason why the New York State Police got search
Speaker 4: warrantson went into his home, and then the FBI getting
Speaker 4: their tech people out there and starting to dig into
Speaker 4: what his postings were, where he went. It was quickly
Speaker 4: learned that he lived downstate, about three hours away on
Speaker 4: the Pennsylvania border, so the state police were immediately activated
Speaker 4: to get to his house.
Speaker 1: Teams were dispatched with warrants, digging through the shooter's home
Speaker 1: and devices, searching for evidence and any sign of accomplices,
Speaker 1: and it didn't take long before they learned that this
Speaker 1: was a plan long in the making.
Speaker 6: He was very methodical.
Speaker 4: He knew exactly where he was going, what he was doing,
Speaker 4: how he was going to advance through the store. He
Speaker 4: put a lot of training into this, which really goes
Speaker 4: at the intentionality of this. With some moderate deviations, he
Speaker 4: went very much according to plan that was laid out
Speaker 4: in his discord diary how he wanted to stop the
Speaker 4: security guard because he knew that the store employed armed security,
Speaker 4: which were all former police officers, and he knew that
Speaker 4: they were going to be a challenge.
Speaker 1: What investigators uncovered next was equal disturbing Tops was only
Speaker 1: meant to be one phase of a larger plot.
Speaker 4: In reviewing the discord diary and manifesto, he had plans
Speaker 4: to go on to two other locations and continue to shoot,
Speaker 4: in his words and his diary, more black people along
Speaker 4: the way between Location one and two and Location two
Speaker 4: and three. We also know from his diary that he
Speaker 4: had an estimated body count that he was trying to
Speaker 4: achieve at each of these three locations. As catastrophic as
Speaker 4: this incident was, it could have been double and triple
Speaker 4: the size of that.
Speaker 1: The horror inside Tops have been planned for months, including
Speaker 1: rehearsals and a final dry run the day before.
Speaker 4: We know that this individual came to the store a
Speaker 4: couple months prior doing reconnaissance and surveying the store, and
Speaker 4: that was part of his diary. There's some older guys
Speaker 4: that like to hang out under the trees, there, and
Speaker 4: they've been doing that for a long time. But one
Speaker 4: guy in particular came up to us and said, I've
Speaker 4: seen that guy here before it goes. As matter of fact,
Speaker 4: I spent time talking to him. But he was also
Speaker 4: there the day before doing a final walkthrough, and he
Speaker 4: had spent some time sitting on the bench out front
Speaker 4: talking to this older gentleman.
Speaker 1: And were they average everyday conversations. Certainly nothing that the
Speaker 1: guy thought was odd at the time, right.
Speaker 4: No, there was nothing that anyone missed that would have
Speaker 4: sent up signal flares of somebody to call.
Speaker 1: What that surveillance revealed was elaborate planning. Uncovering everything they
Speaker 1: could about the shooting remained law enforcement's first priority.
Speaker 4: The FBI had brought in their top evidence collection team.
Speaker 4: That team was flown in. The equipment was flown in
Speaker 4: the next day on Sunday.
Speaker 1: Over the following days, federal specialists left no stone unturned.
Speaker 4: I'm asking the special Agent charge of the Buffalo Field
Speaker 4: Office of the FBI how much longer he thought the
Speaker 4: store would be held as a crime scene. And he
Speaker 4: walked me through the store and showed me exactly what
Speaker 4: they're doing. I mean, the capabilities of the FBI and
Speaker 4: to recreate and the computerization, and they accounted for just
Speaker 4: about every single round and where it went.
Speaker 1: And what became crystal clear was that the lives of
Speaker 1: so many people had been cut short, people just going
Speaker 1: about their everyday lives.
Speaker 4: So as we're walking the store through the front of
Speaker 4: the store, back to the register where one of the victims,
Speaker 4: where that birthday cake was still sitting on the conveyor
Speaker 4: belt with the sun's birthday on there, it.
Speaker 1: Just got a chill down my arm.
Speaker 4: And you said it yeah, And that just unbelievably impactful
Speaker 4: on me.
Speaker 1: As families grappled with grief, law enforcement set the table
Speaker 1: for again Dron's prosecution.
Speaker 4: He was immediately brought back to the Homicide office, brought
Speaker 4: into a room, and the Chief Homicide Prosecutor and the
Speaker 4: homicide team reported rate the Buffalo Police Head Court and
Speaker 4: they took over.
Speaker 1: On June second, twenty twenty two, Gendron was arraigned in
Speaker 1: state court on charges including murder, attempted murder, and hate crimes.
Speaker 4: But top charge, aside from murder in the first degree,
Speaker 4: was the domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which was a
Speaker 4: relatively new charge in New York State, had never, to
Speaker 4: the best of my recollection, never been charged before, but
Speaker 4: most definitely had never been successfully prosecuted.
Speaker 1: The case never went to trial. On November twenty eighth
Speaker 1: of that same year, Gendron Plit guilty. Three months later,
Speaker 1: he was sentenced to life without parole, but a separate
Speaker 1: federal case was still moving forward.
Speaker 4: He is still facing federal charges, which that process is
Speaker 4: making its way through the federal courts, and he's facing
Speaker 4: the death penalty.
Speaker 1: In the aftermath of the mass murder, Garnell's community reached
Speaker 1: far beyond Buffalo. The violence has tied him to other
Speaker 1: greeting families across the country. The crimes are all distinct,
Speaker 1: yet they all shared similar pain.
Speaker 5: I've been all over this country. I've been with all
Speaker 5: of the families, Vivaldi, Sandy Hook, I've been all over
Speaker 5: the place Las Vegas. I've met a lot of these people,
Speaker 5: with a lot of these families, and a lot of
Speaker 5: these shootings happened in schools where you have young people
Speaker 5: who obviously pull out your heartstrings, and it's a huge problem.
Speaker 5: But one of the things I recognize is that Buffalo
Speaker 5: was very different Buffalo. They took our elders. They took
Speaker 5: people who were deeply entrenched and rooted in our community,
Speaker 5: people who others depended upon for sustenance, for care.
Speaker 1: He turned to a metaphor to express the loss.
Speaker 5: Like if you have trees in your yard, and one's
Speaker 5: a sapling and one's a mature tree, the mature trees
Speaker 5: are deeply rooted. They provide sustenance, they provide fruit, they
Speaker 5: provide food, they provide protection for everything on And that's
Speaker 5: what we lost in Buffalo. That's who my mother was.
Speaker 1: Even in their sixties, Garnelle and his siblings still realize
Speaker 1: how much they leaned on their mother.
Speaker 5: We're just still discovering how intertwined and how connected and
Speaker 5: how dependent we all were on her, even at this
Speaker 5: age in our lives. We lived vicariously through her in
Speaker 5: some ways, and you don't realize what you have until
Speaker 5: it's gone.
Speaker 1: Her absence has also brought a new kind of purpose.
Speaker 5: My mother being a mature tree and me being under
Speaker 5: her protection, under her shade, if you would. The other
Speaker 5: thing about these trees in the forest is that everything
Speaker 5: under them, while it is protected, their growth is also stunned.
Speaker 5: And not until that tree is gone, those things under
Speaker 5: it really grow and reach their full potential and grow
Speaker 5: into whatever there issued to be. And so that's the
Speaker 5: other thing about my mother not being here. We've had
Speaker 5: to grow in ways that we could never have done
Speaker 5: while she was here, that we haven't done while she
Speaker 5: was here. And so that's another aspect of this whole thing.
Speaker 5: Her death has given my life purpose and meaning in
Speaker 5: a way that I never would have imagined. My mom
Speaker 5: is bigger in death. My mom's death has and life
Speaker 5: has meaning that it would not have had otherwise. I mean,
Speaker 5: that's just the truth of the matter. So she's forever
Speaker 5: now written in the annals of history as a part
Speaker 5: of what helps drives this conversation and hopefully helps drive change.
Speaker 5: Her death is the impetus for this discussion we're having.
Speaker 5: Her death puts her in a place of eternal She's
Speaker 5: gonna be remembered forever in ways that many of us won't,
Speaker 5: and I think that's fitting. I think that's an honor.
Speaker 5: And I guess in some way she's a murder. So
Speaker 5: I'm very proud of my mother.
Speaker 1: What happened in Buffalo is not a one time anomaly.
Speaker 1: It is tied to other similar tragedies across the US,
Speaker 1: all involved lone gunmen, radicalized online striking with heat filled intent.
Speaker 10: Nearly sixty people are dead and more than five hundred
Speaker 10: injured after a man started shooting into the crowd.
Speaker 1: At a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Speaker 11: Downtown Charleston is a sea of police lights and crime
Speaker 11: scene tape inside the historic em Manual Ame Church. A
Speaker 11: lone gunman described as a white male in his twenties.
Speaker 11: He's believed to have opened fire, ultimately killing nine people
Speaker 11: before fleeing.
Speaker 5: Okay, so you were in the walmart.
Speaker 1: I'm just happy.
Speaker 7: We had just walked in past the produce section and
Speaker 7: we were going to the freezer foods, like where the
Speaker 7: frozen dinners are.
Speaker 9: But I heard.
Speaker 8: Doo doo doo, and then it went do do do do.
Speaker 7: Like closer together, So then that's when I thought it
Speaker 7: was gunshot.
Speaker 1: What happened at Tops was hate in its most lethal form,
Speaker 1: all carried out by just one person. Michael Jensen, a
Speaker 1: researcher who tracks terrorism, says that what makes this modern
Speaker 1: era distinct is the rise of individual terrorists versus groups.
Speaker 10: One of the other features that really kind of separates
Speaker 10: this movement from past ones. Is this moving beyond these
Speaker 10: autonomous cells to individual actors? Right, It's a lone actor
Speaker 10: driven environment in which a single individual can take it
Speaker 10: upon themselves to engage in act of violence on the
Speaker 10: behalf of a broader movement, and not only that, they
Speaker 10: can do it in a way that is very low
Speaker 10: in sophistication and very hard to detect, but very very effective.
Speaker 1: The most common form of terror is no longer the
Speaker 1: bomb plot or coordinated hijacking.
Speaker 10: It's someone within easily acquired assault rifle walking into a
Speaker 10: public place that has no security deterrence and opening fire.
Speaker 10: That's very, very difficult to detect and to respond to.
Speaker 10: But the effect is the same, the fear that it causes,
Speaker 10: the attention that it generates.
Speaker 1: This kind of violence has become part of the national
Speaker 1: news cycle, and that too feeds the problem.
Speaker 10: They're always in the headlines because these attacks are happening
Speaker 10: so frequently, and for these movements, they see that as
Speaker 10: a good thing, right, that they're being talked about, their
Speaker 10: ideas are being talked about. They're reaching new audiences, they're
Speaker 10: drawing in new communities into their online spaces where they
Speaker 10: can rapidly radicalize them.
Speaker 1: What once might have been considered rare is now recurring
Speaker 1: with alarming regularity.
Speaker 10: This trend towards lone actor extremism will can continue. The
Speaker 10: Internet is going to continue to play a massive role
Speaker 10: in radicalizing individuals and getting them involved in these groups.
Speaker 10: In these movements, communication technology is not going anywhere, and
Speaker 10: it's been highly effective in growing the groups, and they
Speaker 10: will look to leverage.
Speaker 1: That these singular actors are no longer the exception, they're
Speaker 1: the norm. As such, law enforcement has been forced to
Speaker 1: learn new ways to combat this reality. For Jeremy Sensky,
Speaker 1: a survivor of the twenty twenty five New Orleans attack,
Speaker 1: the threat of a lone wolf strike wasn't abstract. It
Speaker 1: was the sound of a truck on Bourbon Street barreling
Speaker 1: into a crowd on New Year's Day. We heard his
Speaker 1: story in episode one. That attack is a prime example
Speaker 1: of what modern terrorism looks like.
Speaker 5: Nobody was with me.
Speaker 12: I was by myself. My wife had went back to
Speaker 12: the room with my daughter, and I was on my
Speaker 12: way back to the room. I was almost to Canal Street.
Speaker 12: I mean we're talking maybe ninety seconds. I would have
Speaker 12: been on Canal Street and I wouldn't even this would
Speaker 12: have never.
Speaker 1: Happened ninety seconds. That was the difference between walking back
Speaker 1: into a hotel room or being struck head on.
Speaker 12: The first cough that came over to me, I said,
Speaker 12: my legs, my legs, my legs, And I was like,
Speaker 12: what happened? He said, we don't know. You were trying
Speaker 12: to assess this situation. He just looked at me and said,
Speaker 12: you're lucky to be alive. Everyone around you is dead.
Speaker 1: Yet Jeremy's survival wasn't guaranteed.
Speaker 12: Somebody came over to my head and put a yellow
Speaker 12: ax on my head, So I guess there's different coatings
Speaker 12: they put on your head for like the condition you're in,
Speaker 12: how fast they got to get you, or something like that.
Speaker 12: Yellow is better than red. Red's the worst. And then
Speaker 12: I think there's green, and then I think there's one
Speaker 12: that means you're basically deceased.
Speaker 1: That X meant that his injuries didn't appear life threatening,
Speaker 1: at least not yet.
Speaker 12: They had changed my yellow axe to a red X
Speaker 12: in the ambulance because I had lost so much blood
Speaker 12: and my legs were so bad that I became like
Speaker 12: a party.
Speaker 1: In all around him. Others fared even worse.
Speaker 12: I heard somebody screaming, we found someone over here, we
Speaker 12: found someone in there.
Speaker 5: We needed to do CPR.
Speaker 12: I've heard people say.
Speaker 5: We lost them.
Speaker 12: Basically, I was like one of the last people they
Speaker 12: had attended to in my area.
Speaker 1: As Jeremy was being rushed to the hospital, his family
Speaker 1: had no idea what had happened. His wife, Crystal, tried
Speaker 1: reaching him.
Speaker 13: There was no answer, and I was a little concerned,
Speaker 13: but not too too concerned, because he could have got
Speaker 13: sidetracked on the way home.
Speaker 1: The not knowing is an entirely different type of fear.
Speaker 1: She couldn't just go to bed. Crystal is Jeremy's wife
Speaker 1: but also his caregiver ever since he was in an
Speaker 1: accident in nineteen ninety nine that paralyzed him, so she
Speaker 1: had been nervously waiting up for him that night.
Speaker 13: So I'm like, I'm awake. Now he's got to be
Speaker 13: on his way, so I'll just lay here and watch TV.
Speaker 1: Then an uneasy feeling grew once she picked up the remote.
Speaker 13: So I turned the TV on and I'm like flipping
Speaker 13: the stations, and I happened to stop on something where
Speaker 13: they were talking about it on the news, and I'm like, oh,
Speaker 13: is that in New Orleans? And then I realized, I'm like, God,
Speaker 13: that's in New Orleans. And then I started to panic.
Speaker 13: My daughter had laid back down, and I went in
Speaker 13: her room and I'm like, something is seriously wrong. There's
Speaker 13: something wrong. There's some major thing happening.
Speaker 1: At that point, they started scrambling for answers.
Speaker 13: My daughter and I are putting shoes on. We were
Speaker 13: staying right off a canal, maybe like a block from Bourbon,
Speaker 13: so as soon as we went outside of the hotel,
Speaker 13: we could see like just firetrucks and police and.
Speaker 1: Everything from the street. There were no signs of Jeremy.
Speaker 1: Their search next led to the hospital.
Speaker 12: They kept asking them for the guy in woelchair, and
Speaker 12: no one associated me with a guy in woelchair because
Speaker 12: it wasn't No one actually saw me in a woelchair.
Speaker 13: And finally the head nurse was walking by and she
Speaker 13: stopped in mid track and she was like, oh, my god,
Speaker 13: I just talked to him. He's okay.
Speaker 1: By morning, the world had already seen the wreckage, and
Speaker 1: in the hours after the attack, friends and family started
Speaker 1: calling Crystal. They'd seen a viral photo spreading online.
Speaker 13: One of the reasons why we were so quick to
Speaker 13: go to Facebook is because the morning that had happened,
Speaker 13: people were calling us starting six o'clock in the morning,
Speaker 13: like when they woke up, because that was Jeremy's chair
Speaker 13: in that picture, and that's what was going around was
Speaker 13: the picture of the truck with his chair next to it.
Speaker 1: Jeremy's chair is Jeremy's wheelchair. He relies on it for mobility.
Speaker 1: It was an expensive blue chair with his fanny pack
Speaker 1: still clipped to the seatbelt. Anyone who knew Jeremy would
Speaker 1: recognize it instantly.
Speaker 13: A lot of family and friends were reaching out asking
Speaker 13: is this Jeremy? Is this Jeremy?
Speaker 1: The chair was more than an identifying marker. It might
Speaker 1: have also saved Jeremy's life.
Speaker 13: His wheelchair weighs so much that it would stop the truck.
Speaker 13: And I know that that sounds insane, but what people
Speaker 13: don't realize is that he doesn't have like your normal
Speaker 13: electric wheelchair that your grandpa has. Even without him in
Speaker 13: the chair. That chair weighs over three hundred pounds and
Speaker 13: all the weight is in the.
Speaker 1: Base of it. And now it makes sense too. When
Speaker 1: Jeremy was telling me that he didn't think his chair
Speaker 1: moved very much, that whatever the impact was propelled him.
Speaker 1: Because the picture his wheelchair is right there within feet
Speaker 1: of the truck.
Speaker 13: Yeah, and I mean, of course that lift stopped the truck.
Speaker 13: But it just makes sense that that guy hitting that
Speaker 13: chair had to have caused him to lose somewhat control.
Speaker 13: Like when he hit people, they just either went underneath
Speaker 13: or over the top. Jeremy didn't go underneath or over
Speaker 13: the top of that car. He flew, but the chair
Speaker 13: did not. The chair was still on all four wheels.
Speaker 1: The chair absorbed the impact. Jeremy's body did the rest.
Speaker 13: But it's the bottom part of his legs that were
Speaker 13: just like mangled. And it's like being hit by a truck,
Speaker 13: standing against a boulder or a wall and your leg's
Speaker 13: gonna shatter.
Speaker 1: Recovery would take months.
Speaker 12: My biggest thing was just trying to get my legs
Speaker 12: strong so I don't have to worry about him breaking
Speaker 12: or I feel like com fragile right now.
Speaker 1: Basically, Crystal saw something few others understood. Jeremy's paralysis spared
Speaker 1: him much of the expected physical agony.
Speaker 13: He wasn't in that much pain. I mean, of course,
Speaker 13: he was because he had black eyes and stuff like
Speaker 13: he got beat up, But as to his injuries, he
Speaker 13: couldn't feel any of it. So he was completely coherent,
Speaker 13: like when he says he was laying on the side
Speaker 13: of the street and next to the truck like, he
Speaker 13: was able to be so coherent that he was able
Speaker 13: to try to even though he was confused about what
Speaker 13: was going on, he was not in any pain to
Speaker 13: make him delirious.
Speaker 1: That clarity meant he absorbed every detail, and in the
Speaker 1: weeks after that, trauma followed him home.
Speaker 12: Noises like loud vehicles. There's a lot of people that
Speaker 12: road their trucks up or rub their cars up, and
Speaker 12: anythink it's cool. I guess it is cool if you
Speaker 12: like that kind of thing. I used to go to
Speaker 12: motorcycle races a lot, and truck pulls and stuff like that.
Speaker 12: But whenever I'm going down the street and I hear
Speaker 12: that noise, I'll turn around, look and find out and
Speaker 12: see what tell's coming towards me.
Speaker 1: Now, the street noise was one thing, but when he
Speaker 1: closed his eyes, the entire attack became vivid.
Speaker 12: Just screaming on the street in the sound, that sound
Speaker 12: of that vehicle when it turned off canal as soon
Speaker 12: as it hit that straightaway and made that noise, It's
Speaker 12: just the thunking of people.
Speaker 1: As the weeks passed, Jeremy tried to make sense of
Speaker 1: why he had survived while so many others hadn't.
Speaker 12: Yeah, life's long fair. People tell me I'm glad to
Speaker 12: be alive, and there's a purpose for me. God wants
Speaker 12: me here for something. I keep thinking, if that's true,
Speaker 12: then it has to be something to me, like trying
Speaker 12: to fight terrorism. But I don't know how the Pholas
Speaker 12: fight terrorism. In my position, it is a question.
Speaker 1: He still wrestles with what it means to survive an
Speaker 1: act of hate and how to live with the memories.
Speaker 12: It's very sad that people would kill me, multiple people
Speaker 12: of a religion, or for any reason at all, but
Speaker 12: to do it in the name of some kind of religion.
Speaker 12: I do think about it all the time, and it
Speaker 12: just destroys everybody's confidence and everything, and it makes people
Speaker 12: hate other people.
Speaker 1: The perpetrator took lives and left scars that will never
Speaker 1: fully heal. But for Jeremy, the only path forward is
Speaker 1: resolved and refusing to let hate win.
Speaker 12: I mean, I'm not going to live my life like
Speaker 12: I'm afraid to go anywhere else.
Speaker 5: So some I'm not going to do that.
Speaker 12: They say, what if you do that, the terrorists win.
Speaker 12: I'm not afraid to go anywhere like I have friends
Speaker 12: that don't even leave their house at the time. They're
Speaker 12: afraid to go anywhere. And I go to concerts.
Speaker 6: I love to do stuff there.
Speaker 12: You only live one time, and no matter what handicaps
Speaker 12: I have, I'm going to do whatever I can, however
Speaker 12: I can.
Speaker 1: In New Orleans, it wasn't a foreign network or a
Speaker 1: coordinated cell. It was one man acting alone, weaponizing the ordinary,
Speaker 1: a truck and a crowded street to cause maximum fear
Speaker 1: and destruction. He embodied the new face of extremism, the
Speaker 1: lone actor, radicalized and determined, capable of turning an everyday
Speaker 1: space into a scene of terror. Law enforcement has evolved
Speaker 1: with the shifting facade of terrorism. For decades. Investigators have
Speaker 1: been chasing the threat, learning from each attack, building new tools,
Speaker 1: and adapting. The danger has never disappeared, but neither has
Speaker 1: the effort to confront it. The story of terrorism in
Speaker 1: America is also the story of the people who continue
Speaker 1: to fight it, then and now. The way we all
Speaker 1: fight back is by holding onto our lives, refusing to
Speaker 1: let fear dictate where we go, what we do, do,
Speaker 1: or how we live.
Speaker 5: We're going to have more events, There's no question about
Speaker 5: it that it's going to happen.
Speaker 13: You need to project a.
Speaker 2: Positive response and basically maintain your way of life.
Speaker 1: There's evil out there and it has to be defeated
Speaker 1: when you see it.
Speaker 5: It can't be coddled, it can't be excused. It has
Speaker 5: to be defeated.
Speaker 7: We are all going to have things happen in our
Speaker 7: life that are out of our control, that are bad.
Speaker 7: But you always have control of a response. Even in
Speaker 7: the moments where I was buried alive, I couldn't move,
Speaker 7: I couldn't do anything. I had my mind, I could think,
Speaker 7: I could get my mind on something different. I could
Speaker 7: control that. That has been helpful for me.
Speaker 5: Anyway.
Speaker 1: If we let it alter the rhythm of our days,
Speaker 1: then the violence echoes beyond the attack, because the moment
Speaker 1: fear changes our day to day. Their mission is complete,
Speaker 1: and behind every headline, every case we've told this season,
Speaker 1: there are teams of people working tirelessly and often invisibly, agents, analysts,
Speaker 1: prosecutors and local police. Together, they carry the fight forward
Speaker 1: to keep the peace, to bring justice, and to make
Speaker 1: sure the next attack is stopped before it begins.
Speaker 2: Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of
Speaker 2: Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi.
Speaker 2: The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive produced by
Speaker 2: Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf, and Steve Michael at Wolf Entertainment
Speaker 2: on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor Young and
Speaker 2: Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.
Speaker 2: This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Our
Speaker 2: researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmage. Editing and sound
Speaker 2: designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk. Original music by
Speaker 2: John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post with additional music
Speaker 2: by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zarnkelton.
Speaker 2: Special thanks to Fox five in New York for providing
Speaker 2: archival material for the show. For more podcasts from iHeart
Speaker 2: in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or
Speaker 2: wherever you get your favorite shows. Thanks for listening,