Those who lost loved ones in Tops shooting aim to turn agony into action

By Jerry Zremski

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    WASHINGTON (The Buffalo News) — Four weeks to the day since his 86-year-old mother, Ruth Whitfield, and nine others were shot to death in a racist attack on the Tops on Buffalo’s East Side, Garnell Whitfield Jr. will stand before a crowd of up to 50,000 on the National Mall on Saturday and call for gun safety measures aimed at preventing such attacks from happening again.

Twenty-five days after the Tops gunman left her son Zaire Goodman with deep wounds in his neck, his back and his left leg, Zeneta Everhart sat stone-faced before a congressional committee, just as Whitfield had a day before, and described the horrors of the attack and the role that racism played in it.

And on that very same day, Pamela Pritchett – whose mother, Pearl Young, was slain in that attack – repeated the mantra she coined at a news conference a day earlier, a phrase that could well serve as the motto for the families of the Tops slaughter.

“Every tear I cry is going to be a fuel for action,” she said.

Plenty of tears have been shed since a shooter clad in body armor took aim at defenseless shoppers on that sunny Saturday afternoon in Buffalo – and judging by what those who lost loved ones in that attack said and did this week, there’s plenty of fuel for action. Several of those family members were omnipresent on Capitol Hill and in the national media. And to hear them tell it, they will be omnipresent activists for as long as it takes to reform the nation’s gun laws and confine racism to history’s dustbin.

“Our family made a conscious decision upon the death of our mother not to go quietly into the night, not to just be a victim, but to use the immense pain and anger in a positive way to advocate to advocate for justice for her and the other victims as as well as for impactful change,” said Whitfield, who will return to Washington to speak at Saturday’s “March for Our Lives,” a rally for stronger gun safety measures.

Whitfield said he sees the united families from Buffalo’s East Side as the latest in a long line of American activists who have fought for change, from the abolitionists to those who joined the civil rights movement to the Flight 3407 families to the gun safety advocates from Parkland, Fla.

“We’re not reinventing the wheel here,” said Whitfield, a former Buffalo fire commissioner. “We certainly are trying to model ourselves after those precedents who have successfully advocated for change.”

Whitfield and several others who lost loved ones in the attack described themselves as fundamentally changed – and moved to act to try to prevent others from suffering losses such as they have.

Kimberly Salter said she felt she had to work for change to honor her husband, Aaron Salter Jr., the Tops security guard killed in the massacre.

“He made the ultimate sacrifice for everybody and for me, and I’m making the sacrifice for him,” she said.

Similarly, Michelle Spight was moved to come to Washington after losing two family members: her aunt, Pearl Young, and her cousin Margus D. Morrison.

“It has fueled my life in a way that I never thought would be,” she said of the shooting.

And Pritchett spoke with an unexpected, unbridled passion at two news conferences last week.

“Listen to me,” she said after baking in the sun for nearly an hour at the second of those two press conferences. “I sound like I’m preaching, y’all!”

All of this impressed Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer, a New York Democrat, who praised the families as “saint-like.”

“Those deaths, as horrible as they were, as searing as they are in our hearts, you are making sure they will not have died in vain,” he told the families last week. “We will join you in that effort until we succeed. Thank you and God bless you.”

The change the families are seeking starts with the nation’s gun laws. They’re pressing for comprehensive background checks for all gun buyers, thereby closing loopholes that now exist for guns sold online and at gun shows, as well as for moving the minimum age for buying rifles from 18 to 21 and other reforms.

“Lawmakers who continuously allow these mass shootings to continue by not passing stricter gun laws should be voted out,” Everhart told the House Oversight and Reform Committee last week.

A bipartisan group of senators is trying to negotiate a deal on guns, but even if one passes, it will likely fall short of what many activists want: a ban on the kind of assault weapons and high-capacity magazines used in the Buffalo attack.

The family members stressed, though, that their advocacy is not just about gun safety.

“The march is all about gun violence in America, and obviously, we are the children of a slain victim of gun violence,” said Raymond Whitfield, Garnell Whitfield’s brother, who will also attend Saturday’s march. “But our particular angle is a slightly different in that we are all about shining a light on the myth of white supremacy as it relates to that gun violence.”

That point came particularly clear in Everhart’s testimony at that House hearing on the proliferation of guns in America.

Everhart combined her thoughts on guns with comments on race that seemed to make some Republicans at the hearing uncomfortable. Amid a time when Republicans are pressing to downplay the history of race in America in the nation’s schools, Everhart repeatedly described herself as a descendant of slaves and said: “We cannot continue to whitewash education, creating generations of children to believe that one race of people are better than the other.”

Later that same day, Everhart reiterated that point at a press conference with House members, and further spread her message on interviews on several national television networks.

She expects to be doing plenty more of the same, for a very long time, she said, knowing that the problems she’s trying to fix often seem intractable.

“This is a table that we don’t ever get up from,” Everhart said on Friday before boarding another plane bound for Washington for Saturday’s “March for Our Lives. “I have to stay at the table as long as I possibly can until I keel over. I am optimistic, extremely optimistic, but I’m also a realist. I’m a logical thinker, and I live in the real world. So it’s going to take some hard, hard work. But I promise that I’m not going to stop until I see some sort of change.”

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