- The Buffalo
shooting suspect kept records and photos of his plans months before the attack, per The New York Times. - About 30 minutes before the attack, he invited others to join a chat room filled with that material.
The 18-year-old white gunman suspected of killing 10 people in a racially-motivated attack in Buffalo on Saturday shared his plans with others in an online chat room before the massacre, according to several media reports.
Months before the attack, the suspect uploaded photos, hand-drawn maps, and detailed messages of his preparations on a private Discord server available only to him, per The New York Times.
The images included him posing with gear, such as a military-style helmet bought from eBay, body armor plates, and the semiautomatic weapon that police said he used in the shooting, according to The Washington Post, which first reported the messages.
In his messages, he wrote of how he lied to authorities in a psychiatric evaluation after making a threatening comment in class about a murder-suicide, per The Post. He also shared a document published by Brenton Tarrant, an avowed racist who killed 51 Muslims in two attacks in Christchurch, New Zealand.
Starting on February 17, the suspect started writing on his Discord server that he had a "new plan" — to attack Black people at the Tops grocery store in Buffalo, where the shooting eventually happened, The Post reported.
He wrote that he had scouted out the location and was even confronted by a security guard in what he called a "close call," the outlet reported.
Around 30 minutes before he carried out his attack on Saturday, the suspect started inviting others to join his Discord server, sending links to like-minded individuals on web forums, per The Times.
A small group of people joined the server and were able to view the server's chat logs and past uploaded photos, a Discord spokesperson said, according to The Times.
"Before that, our records indicate no other people saw the diary chat log in this private server," the spokesperson said.
None of those invited to the group appear to have alerted law enforcement or tried to do anything to stop the attack, The Times reported.
The server has since been removed, according to The Post, citing Discord's spokesperson.
The suspect also live-streamed his attack on Twitch, the platform confirmed. Twitch said they terminated the stream within two minutes of the violence beginning.