On the afternoon of May 14, 2022, 18-year-old Payton Gendron, an antisocial white kid from an upper middle-class New York neighborhood, donned body armor and a military helmet, picked up an AR-15 covered in racial epithets, strapped a GoPro to his head and drove about 200 miles to a predominantly black neighborhood in Buffalo, New York. Once there, Gendron pulled up to a TOPS grocery store and hit “go live” on the Twitch livestreaming app moments before unleashing a devastating attack against the shoppers. The resulting livestream video looked like something straight out of a Call of Duty video game - a third person view of a rifle firing at people as they fell lifelessly to the ground. Gendron targeted black people. At one point in the video, he aimed his gun at a person, saw that they were white, and muttered “sorry” before leaving the person alive and continuing his rampage.Ten lives were tragically lost that day.
Gendron was apprehended by police at the scene and ultimately pled guilty to state charges which included first degree murder, domestic terrorism and hate crimes. He was handed 11 consecutive life sentences on the state level, but a pending federal case against Gendron leaves the death penalty on the table. And while the prosecutors have insisted this shooting was an open and shut case of racially motivated violent extremism, many questions were left unanswered.
One of these questions, which was largely ignored by the mainstream media, pertained to Gendron’s online network. Gendron had extensive online contact with a couple of shadowy provocateurs in the weeks preceding the attack. One of them, who he called “Saint Sandman”, gave him advice ranging from what type of gun parts and gear to buy to how to plan the timing of his attack so that he wouldn’t go to jail (advice which Gendron ultimately ignored). Sandman played a role in indoctrinating Gendron with neo-fascist ideologies reminiscent of the Christchurch, New Zealand shooter, including The Great Replacement theory. To top it off, early reports on the shooting mentioned that several people joined Gendron’s Discord server about 30 minutes before the shooting began. One of those individuals was said to be a retired FBI agent.
Now, new details have been released that shine a fresh light on this already memory-holed shooting. A DHS press release from June 2024 announced the arrest of an individual named Hayden Espinosa on charges of facilitating a criminal enterprise of illegal gun sales via Telegram. His channel, which he ran while sitting in prison for an unrelated matter, was frequently visited by Gendron. This is our first window into the FBI’s investigation into Gendron’s network in over two years since the tragedy unfolded. Additionally, new details have emerged confirming previous suspicions that Gendron was connected to CVLT, a Satanic extortion and child exploitation ring which was a predecessor to the 764 cult. These new revelations raise even more questions than they answer, however, the overall picture has started to become much clearer.
So, what was Gendron’s connection to these Satanic pedophilia networks? How did this ordinary young man from the suburbs become radicalized enough to commit such a horrific act? Why was there a retired fed in his Discord server? And who is Saint Sandman?
This exclusive deep dive into Gendron’s network and ideological motivators offers a wealth of information not available anywhere else. Please consider subscribing to read the article in its entirety.
A Familiar Path to Radicalization
Payton Gendron lived in Conklin, New York with his parents and two younger brothers. By all accounts, the family was completely normal. Both of Gendron’s parents were civil engineers, each earning a six-figure salary. Gendron’s school history was similarly unremarkable. He wasn’t known by his peers to be an extremist, and he didn’t regularly get into trouble. He graduated from his high school with honors and was enrolled in SUNY with a major in Engineering Science.
One notable detail about Gendron, disclosed by his family after the shooting, is that he began to exhibit extreme hypochondriac and agoraphobic tendencies in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. He wore a mask everywhere, even in his own bedroom, and once wore a full HAZMAT suit to his high school. He was first in line to get vaccinated. More importantly, however, was the way Gendron withdrew from family and friends. He retreated to his room and began to spend most of his time online.
Gendron began visiting the website 4chan out of boredom around May of 2020. In his Discord diary, he wrote, “I only really turned racist when 4chan started giving me facts.” In his manifesto, Gendron writes about stumbling upon the livestream video of the Christchurch, New Zealand mass shooter and spiraling down a familiar radicalization path to online extremist communities and domestic terrorism. Neo-Nazis, white supremacists, and various others comingle in this space, and the glue that holds these extremists together is a concept called “accelerationism”. Accelerationism is not an ideology, but a doctrine – a collection of theory-backed tactics designed to accelerate the collapse of Western societal and political structure by various means. For example, by sparking a race war, overthrowing the government, or provoking a Civil War. In an excerpt straight out of Gendron’s “Lolcow Manifesto”:
Destabilization and accelerationism: tactics for victory
True change and the change we need to enact only arises in the great crucible of crisis. A gradual change is never going to achieve victory. Stability and comfort are the enemies of revolutionary change. Therefore we must destabilize and discomfort society wherever possible.
A political candidate that keeps the status quo or only seeks to introduce minimal change, even when the minimal change is in support of our cause, is ultimately useless or even damaging. Revolutionary change is needed and above all necessary. It is far better to encourage radical, violent change regardless of its origins. As only in times of radical change and social discomfort can great and terrific change occur. These tumultuous times can be brought about through action. For example, actions such as voting for political candidates that radically change or challenge entrenched systems, radicalizing public discourse by both supporting, attacking, vilifying, radicalizing and exaggerating all societal conflicts and attacking or even assassinating weak or less radical leaders/influencers on either side of social conflicts. A vote for a radical candidate that opposes your values and incites agitation or anxiety in your own people works far more in your favor than a vote for a milquetoast political candidate that has no ability or wish to enact radical change.
Canvas public areas in support of radical positions, even if they are not your own. Incite conflict. Place posters near public parks calling for sharia law, then in the next week place posters over such posters calling for the expulsion of all immigrants, repeat in every area of public life until the crisis arises. Destabilize, then take control. If we want to radically and fundamentally change society, then we need to radicalize society as much as possible.
DO NOT FEAR CHANGE, WE ARE CHANGE
Given what we already know about the nature of the online spaces Gendron inhabited, it’s easy to deduce his immediate proximity to accelerationist domestic terror groups on platforms like Discord and Telegram. Such spaces use 4chan and other similar websites as funnels to gain large userbases which then fester into echo chambers of hate. And yet, out of say 1000 members on a large white nationalist Telegram channel, only one or two will end up making major headlines. Young and neurodivergent men, like the extremely neurotic and hypochondriac Gendron, make the perfect prey for sinister individuals looking to groom people into committing terror attacks by proxy.
And that’s exactly what happened in this case. In Gendron’s Discord diary, he repeatedly references a mentor who he refers to as Saint Sandman.
Jimboboiii — 05/02/2022
“When the time finally comes to deal decisively with a whole host of society's problems, and not go to prison for it, you'll know. Just be ready. You have spent your entire life, from the day you were born, right up to this very moment, reading this sentence, coming to where you are right now.
Look around you. Are you content with where you are right now? Are you where you want to be? If so, continue to march. If not, what are you going to do? What's your plan? Get and keep your mind, body, and spirit right. Pray. Lift. Run. Read. Shoot. And teach your kids to do those things.” -Saint Sandman
Jimboboiii — 05/09/2022
Full auto BCG > semi auto BCG for smoothness and reliabilty
Make another low end tier and add anderson and delton to it, low end but slightly better than the sh*t tier. Another blessing from saint Sandman thank you for your service.
Jimboboiii — 05/09/2022
Sandman once told me to wait until you won’t go to prison. I disagree, the feds will always have control over you if you fear imprisonment. You must not let them control you or your movements. No matter what do what is right for your people and your race.
Starting in 2020, Gendron began to exhibit signs of a mental health crisis. He was investigated by the police for threats made to students at his high school, ultimately resulting in a referral to a hospital for a mental health evaluation. He was released after only one day due to his insistence that the threats were simply jokes. Gendron later admitted in a social media post that he was bluffing, and that he had meant every word. Also around this time, Gendron was noted to be a member of Discord servers which primarily discussed weapons and tactical related topics. According to Unicorn Riot, Gendron made at least 80 posts in a server called “Plate Land”. While Unicorn Riot provides a link to download the posts made by Gendron, the remainder of the Plate Land Discord logs appear to have been removed from their site, making it impossible to determine the identity of other users he was conversing with.
Gendron began using a private Discord server to document his plans, along with his interactions with Saint Sandman, in November of 2021. He had originally planned to unleash his attack on March 15th, the anniversary of the day that Brenton Tarrant murdered 50 people and injured 50 others at a mosque in Christchurch, New Zealand. Ironically, Gendron couldn’t carry out the attack as planned – He had caught COVID-19.
The identity of Saint Sandman is, in my opinion, the most important piece of information we can hope to glean from this investigation. After all, Gendron was just a proxy soldier. A Manchurian Candidate of sorts, targeted due to his unique psychological vulnerabilities. His programmer is, presumably, still on the loose. How long before he finds another proxy soldier to commit another attack? Perhaps this next attack will echo the Robb Elementary School shooting, where a deranged gunman took the lives of nineteen 4th grade children and two teachers in Uvalde, Texas.
Timeline of the TOPS Shooting
At 11:00am on May 14, 2022, Gendron departed his home in Conklin, New York and began the 3-1/2 hour trip to Buffalo. Thirty minutes before the shooting began, Gendron sent out invite links to his private Discord server. Prior to this, his Discord was used only as a personal diary and had not been viewed by anyone else. Approximately 15 people from other Discord servers accepted the invite to join Gendron’s server. The invitation included a caption that read, “Happening: This is not a drill.” and included a link to his Twitch livestream, though he would eventually stream the shooting from a Discord channel, as well.
According to The Buffalo News, one of the people who joined Gendron’s Discord server was a retired federal agent. Law enforcement told The Buffalo News that they were investigating this information. Gendron had outlined his plans to send the Discord invite to servers he was involved with as well as to his personal friends. At this time, it is not publicly known whether the retired FBI agent was a personal Discord friend of Gendron or simply an onlooker in a Discord server where the invite was posted. If the invite was posted in Plate Land or a similar extremist-adjacent server, then it shouldn’t be surprising that an ex-fed was in there paying attention. However, whether or not that individual properly escalated concerns about an imminent mass shooting threat remains unknown.
Gendron arrived at the TOPS supermarket at 2:30pm. He was wearing a military helmet and body armor and wielding a Bushmaster AR-15 style rifle. As he stepped out of his car, he started a livestream on Twitch.tv via his helmet-mounted GoPro camera. He was heard saying “just got to go for it” right before opening fire on a person standing in the street in front of the store. Gendron then charged through the store, shooting only black shoppers as he uttered racial slurs. Twitch ended Gendron’s gruesome livestream after just under two minutes.
As Gendron continued moving through the store, he encountered an armed security guard and former police officer, Aaron Salter Jr, who shot at him. Gendron was able to return fire, killing Salter. Though some reports allege that Salter’s shots were stopped by Gendron’s body armor, I have not seen this information substantiated in official records. It seems quite improbable that Gendron was hit by suppressive gunfire and still able to continue his shooting spree, even with armor on. Regardless, this information was seized on by New York politicians and used to pass laws restricting the sale of body armor.
After six long minutes and over sixty shots fired, Gendron returned to the front of the building where police waited. He put his gun to his neck but was later talked out of suicide and taken into custody. Ten people were killed and three others wounded in the attack. All ten of the people killed were black.
I am an independent researcher who does this kind of dark work because I feel compelled to assist victims and educate the public. Consider supporting my Substack with a paid subscription!
The Lolcow Manifesto
Gendron’s manifesto is a hot mess. The 180-page document, which he titled “Lolcow Manifesto”, comprises long passages stolen from other extremist writings, including large portions that come straight from Brenton Tarrant’s Christchurch shooting manifesto, all mashed up with 4chan memes and racist/antisemitic propaganda. The use of the term “Lolcow” in the title reflects the mind of a very terminally online young man. This term, popularized on 4chan and Kiwi Farms, is used to describe an online personality who is easy to make fun of and therefore can be milked for entertainment purposes.
Speaking of Kiwi Farms, users of that site did a great job compiling extensive information about Gendron, including his possible connections to various other online communities. Kiwi Farms was also responsible for debunking a disinformation campaign that fueled conspiracy theories about Gendron’s network, including one claiming to have identified his groomer.
Shortly after the shooting, a person believed to be a fellow member of the Plate Land Discord server posted on Twitter about the incident. This person was a “Brony” – the term used to describe a niche community of male “My Little Pony” fans. The Brony community found its origins on 4chan in the early 2010s and spread throughout various online spaces, including 4chan’s /pol/ board, before making its way into Plate Land and other related communities. The information provided by the Brony was the first indication of Gendron’s involvement in Plate Land.
It wasn’t long before the Gendron information drops on 4chan turned into disinformation drops. Several posters on /pol/ began to implicate a man named “Armand” as being Saint Sandman. These posts, which contained forged Discord screenshots of interactions between Gendron and Armand, spread like wildfire across social media. Some of the accounts spreading this disinformation were obviously associated with online extremism communities. These same communities spread an identical lie about Armand in the wake of the Uvalde school shooting, which took place just a few days later. Kiwi Farms users eventually sussed out this disinformation, claiming it originated in a fringe community called Frens Chan. They theorized that this could have been a coordinated effort by Frens Chan to divert attention away from their own community by framing another community, though this has yet to be confirmed.
Discord released a statement about the Buffalo shooting which included a reference to the Armand disinformation campaign:
These are the actions we have taken so far…
· Identified and removed accounts of malicious actors who we found to be creating fake Discord chat logs to trick law enforcement and media outlets.
Representatives from Discord also confirmed to Mashable that Gendron never had contact with a person named Armand, and that the interactions had been faked.
The Prison-Run Gun Ring
In 2023, Ken Silva of Headline USA News was denied a Freedom of Information Act request for records relating to the mass shooting in Buffalo. Silva requested the information in the wake of reporting from The Buffalo News which revealed that the FBI was “tracking down and interviewing six people, including the retired agent,” all of whom may have had contact with Gendron in an online chatroom 30 minutes before his shooting. The FOIA was denied by the FBI, citing an exemption for records relating to a pending law enforcement investigation.
Two years later we now have confirmation that a law enforcement investigation was indeed ongoing. According to a June 12, 2024 DHS press release, a man named Hayden Espinosa was arrested and charged with selling illegal firearms and components to an undercover officer while incarcerated in a Louisiana prison. Espinosa allegedly ran the criminal enterprise via Telegram using burner phones he had snuck into his cell. His Telegram group was called 3D Amendment and was closely intertwined with the so-called Terrorgram Collective – a network of neo-fascist and accelerationist Telegram channels that promote racially motivated violence and domestic terrorism.
The DHS press release explained that the investigation into Espinosa was actually an extension of the investigation into Gendron. Analysis of Gendron’s social media networks allowed investigators to place him in the very same chat room where Espinosa was selling illegal guns. Shockingly, the press release provided enough information to identify Espinoza’s Telegram and Instagram handles, and even more shockingly, none of the channels had been pulled down from their respective platforms. This was a convenient, albeit unusual, circ*mstance which allowed us a more thorough glimpse of his network.
This exclusive deep dive into Gendron’s network and ideological motivators offers a wealth of information not available anywhere else. Please subscribe to continue reading.
It came as no surprise at all that Espinosa’s Telegram handle, @Treason3D, popped up in a variety of Terrorgram channels. Espinosa, whose Telegram username was composed of two German Wolfsangel symbols, was a member of a channel called Forum 1488, a large neo-Nazi community with over 1000 members. In another forum dedicated to pro-Ukranian Neo-fascism, Espinosa made multiple posts attempting to sell guns to other extremists, including one post where he stated he was posting from prison. When another member said, “selling illegal firearms to n*ggers. Woooow so based bro,” Espinosa replied, “it sure af is bc then they kill each other with them.” Espinosa was also a member of a channel belonging to Misanthropic Division. Misanthropic Division is anAzov Batallion support group with factions all over the world, including Ukraine and Russia. Azov founder Andriy Biletsky told the Intercept in 2022 that there were no North American divisions of Misanthropic Division.The Telegram channel is completely composed of non-English speakers typing in Cyrillic.
Espinosa’s online activity also overlapped with COM via a Doxbin Telegram channel. COM is a highly decentralized network of cybercriminal communities involved in hacking, swatting and extortion, as well as some isolated groups that engage in child sexual exploitation, animal torture, and satanic ritual abuse. The Doxbin website is closely linked to COM and acts as a sort of extortion racket in its own right. Cybercriminals and hackers use the site to post “doxes” of people they don’t like, either for pay or for play. The Doxbin entriesare then sometimes used to SWAT, harass, or solicit crimes against the subjects.
Note: 764 and the COM network are explained in more detail in my article, 764 Part 1.
The COM Connection
Long before we had any evidence linking Gendron to COM, rumors of his involvement in a group called CVLT swirled throughout the network. Closely linked to 764, CVLT was a Satanism-based group that engaged in the extortion and sexual abuse of children. 21-year-old Kaleb Merritt was arrested and later sentenced to life in prison for grooming, sexually exploiting, and eventually kidnapping a 12-year-old girl from Virginia who he had found on Instagram and then pulled into a CVLT Discord server. Merritt groomed the young girl and manipulated her into carving the numbers “764” into her chest. In February of 2021, Merritt drove from his home in Texas to the victim’s home in Virginia, where he set up a camp in the woods behind the young girl’s house and repeatedly raped her prior to abducting her. An AMBER alert was issued, and police were able to capture Merritt and bring the girl back home safely.
Merritt is believed to be the owner of an Instagram account called o9a.evil, validating the beliefs of many researchers that child predator groups like 764 and CVLT are closely linked to the Satanic neo-Nazi terror group, Order of Nine Angles. Another high-profile member of 764, Angel Almeida, was also linked to O9A and had their logo tattooed onto his chest. O9A is a Satanic accelerationist group that adheres to a National Socialist ideology. Its members are insidious and permeate all levels of Terrorgram.
Kaleb Merrit’s young victim was the first credible source to link Gendron to the group. She stated he used the username “Nexim” in a CVLT Discord server. This information was later confirmed by police to a major media outlet who is in the process of making a documentary on 764.As explosive as this confirmation is, it’s still relatively unsurprising given what we already know about the early Terrorgram channels and how they overlapped with COM networks.
Entries from Gendron’s Discord diary raised red flags about his deteriorating mental health and alarming psychopathic tendencies. For example, he described chasing around a cat before catching and decapitating it. CVLT and other related groups are well known for both distributing and soliciting acts of animal abuse, child abuse, self-harm and extreme violence. Graphic videos originating both internally and externally to the groups circulate throughout the network, desensitizing young users and conditioning them to find such content normal, or even amusing.
The extreme, violence-centric online environments Gendron inhabited combined with his spiraling mental state created the perfect storm for what his White Nationalist associates would dub the “Day of Terror”. They memorialized Gendron by giving him the title of “Saint”, a term commonly used by the group to describe someone who’s committed mass murder to further their accelerationist agenda. References to Saint Gendron abound in Terrorgram channels to this day. Many of these same channels are also littered with Satanic and occultist symbology and literature, a tell-tale sign of O9A influence in the space.
Who is Saint Sandman?
So, who exactly is this Saint Sandman character who was in Gendron’s ear, and is he still lurking around Terrorgram? It’s hard to say. There are multiple individuals in this network of neo-Nazis and cultists who fit the profile and have gone by the name Sandman.Perhaps they have been questioned by the FBI already, or perhaps the FBI didn’t have enough ammo to build a case against them. Law enforcement authorities in America face several key challenges when investigating online extremists. The power of free speech extends to an individual’s right to post repulsive and offensive things online, and even to their right to espouse hateful ideologies that include calls for racially motivated violence. Unless there is an explicit solicitation of terrorism involved, as there was in the recent case of Michail “Butcher”Chkhikvishvili, leader of foreign terrorist group MKU, many instances of online provocation prove difficult or even impossible to prosecute.
Authorities face additional challenges if the provocateur is operating within a country that doesn’t readily cooperate with the United States. Cases in which 764 network members operate out of countries like Libya, Serbia, and Russia have proven extremely difficult to navigate. And then there’s the problem presented by Telegram, which is hosted in Dubai and doesn’t like to cooperate with United States law enforcement investigations. Remember a couple of weeks ago when it was revealed that Thomas Matthew Crooks, the failed Trump assassin, had “overseas encrypted accounts” that the FBI was having trouble gaining access to? Well, guess what a Telegram account is?
As for Sandman, I’m sorry to report that he is not alone. There are hundreds, maybe even thousands of people just like him online, and while many of these individuals are certainly being monitored by law-enforcement, they are more or less untouchable until they make a misstep, and they are more or less invisible while in private chats with their target (unless, of course, that target happens to be an undercover law-enforcement officer.)
When I first began my research into online grooming and provocation of mass shooters, it all seemed very simple. Find out who’s targeting these kids and stop them! But the unfortunate reality is that our ability to prevent the indoctrination of vulnerable young adults into violent extremist ideologies hinges on the capabilities of our overburdened and mismanaged federal law enforcement agencies. As a person whose vocabulary does not include the words “trust the government”, I have found this to be the hardest pill to swallow in the entire course of my research into this topic.
My stories are usually suppressed by platforms due to the graphic nature of the content. Please share!
Share
