S2 E10: Lone Wolf

You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.

In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law. The brave men and women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that is defined American history. These are their stories. May fourteenth, twenty twenty two, two thirty pm, Buffalo, New York.

The hum of a Saturday afternoon at Top's Friendly Supermarket, shopping carts rolling across pavement, families moving through the aisles.

Then screams, we are following reports of a mass shooting at Tops Supermarket in Buffalo, New York. Police say there are are quote multiple victims, but other details are scarce and there is still a large police presence on sceen.

Gunfire echoed through the store. Each shot ricocheted off tailand steel. Customers ducked behind shelves, workers pressed themselves flat against the floor. In less than five minutes, ten lives were gone, and across the city's East side, words spread at lightning speed phones rang as sirens wailed. What had begun as an ordinary trip for groceries had become a community's darkest hour.

When I first saw him shooting, he shot a woman, he shot a deacon, he shot another woman, and then he went in the store and started shooting again.

So I don't know who he was shooting at because he shot at least eight eight people.

So he came feel safe in your own neighborhood. People come over here.

What are we suits on shooting people?

This is what DULs.

I got a call. Get out to LaGuardia Airport. There's been a bombing. There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

I was trying to figure out, am I dead? Am I alive? Where am I?

I'm Aniseega Nicolazi.

That's why terrorism works. It doesn't care who you are.

From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts, this is law and order, criminal justice system. Buffalo, New York, sits on the edge of Lake Erie, where the water meets the city's skyline. Its streets stretch outward into old steel towns and quiet neighborhoods. It's a place shaped by industry and weather, known for its resilience as much as for its long winters. But beneath the surface, Buffalo is also a city marked by deep divides between its west side and its east side,

I was a Commissioner of Fire, an emergency management for the city of Buffalo, and did thirty four years with the fire Department.

Garnell knows the city like the back of his hand. On the east side sat a single supermarket known as Tops. It stood on Jefferson Avenue, on a street that used to be a thriving corridor for black businesses, but has since endured decades of disinvestment. It was a rare anchor in a neighborhood long abandoned.

Tops is the only market on the east side of Buffalo. It's a food desert where eighty ninety percent of people of color live in Buffalo, New York.

For thousands of families. This carried meaning far greater than it's square footage.

It's a lifeline, yeah, I mean prescriptions whatever. It is just a place that fellowship and meet. It's a place of community. That's what it is, and it's in the heart of the East side of Buffalo.

It was a steady presence in a part of the city where so much else had been stripped away.

There's a lot of things about Buffalo, and it's a former steel town. That industry is no longer in existence, and so Buffalo has suffered for years. Buffalo is a very poor city. It is at this particular moment, I think, one of the sixth poor city in America, the sixth most racially divided city in America for city its size. It's one of the only cities in America of its size that does not have a minority suburb.

Those conditions weren't foreign to him. He'd known them since he was a child.

We've been in Buffalo my entire life. I remember being very poor. My father, I think, made fifty dollars a week working at one of the local stores. And we lived in the projects. I mean, we grew up in the projects. But my mom never let the projects grow in us, you know what I'm saying.

At the center was his mother, Ruth. She was the one who lifted the family up, refusing to let circumstances to find them.

She was very proud of her family. She was very proud, even though sometimes maybe she shouldn't have because we weren't all I know. I caused her some consternation, but she loved her family. She was married to my dad for sixty eight years.

All truism shaped her life. She spent years caring for the elderly, and even in her own retirement, she continued to look after others.

Here's somebody who would bring strangers home, Somebody who would visit the other people in the nursing home, no matter what color they are. Somebody who was kind, somebody who was loving, Somebody who believed in God and believed in advocating for them least of these. That's who she was.

By the spring of twenty twenty two, Ruth was eighty six. That Mother's Day, Garnell decided to do something special.

I had taken on a project of building her a raised garden planter. She'd liked to grow fruits and vegetables or whatever, and she had terrible back issues and could not really tend to soil and bend over and do that kind of thing anymore. So she could never buy her anything. She'd had to buy it for herself. So we had gotten used to giving her money. But I wanted to do something more personal. This particular Mother's Day, so I decided to build her raised planter and give

By late afternoon, the planter was in place, the soil leveled, and the work nearly finished. It was time to wrap up, so.

I left her exactly a quarter to three on five point thirteen. I said, I'm going to come back in the morning and put some more dirt and raise the level up even higher. You don't have to bend over as much, and it's ready for planting. And she says she was going to go get some seeds and we were going to meet the next day.

The next morning, Garnell made good on his promise that brought over dirt.

I put it in, knocked on the door, she didn't answer. She needed to wear hearing age, and half the time didn't wear them, and I didn't know if she just didn't hear me, or she was resting, because she did not sleep much at all. She was waiting on a nerve block injection for her back and was in dire pain. So I didn't want to disturb her, so I said, I'll cut your at the nursing home. So I left. I never saw her again.

The rest of that morning passed quietly. Garnell ran a few errands with his wife. They were driving home when the phone rang.

My sister in law caught and said that something had occurred at Tops. Had we heard? And I said no, we hadn't heard. We came back home and tried to find out what was going on. There was no news, there was nothing on the TV.

He picked up the phone again, this time to call his mother.

So I called my mom just to check on her. I hadn't seen her that morning. She didn't answer. My wife called her sister and she didn't answer.

The silence wasn't settling. The television soon broadcast the breaking news.

Eventually, maybe fifteen twenty minutes, ribbon started coming across the bottom of the TV, not with any real specific information, but it's something that had occurred at Tops.

We're following the letters on that mass shooting in our country, reports so that eight people had been killed. Reports say the gunman issued some type of manifesto, that the attack appears to be targeted, not yet confirmed though by authorities.

With a new sense of urgent. See. Garnell was intent on reaching his mom, and.

So I called my mom again and she didn't answer. And then I waited a few minutes, and I told my wife. I said, I'm going to go check on my mom.

As he drove, his mind kept circling back to the unanswered calls. He stopped by her house, the car wasn't there. He called again, still no answer. Something pulled him toward Jefferson Avenue.

I know all of those people that responded, FBI, atf Buffalo Police, Fire, Erie County, all of those people I've worked with down to the year, so I know them all personally. I couldn't find my mother. I was hoping that I knew where she was, and something led me to go by Tops. So I just showed up over there at Tops.

What he founded the market was mayhem.

It was chaotic, it was a shooting, no definitive information, There was no specifics or anything. There was a shooting.

In a matter of hours, his calm morning had turned to panic, and at the center of it all was the rock of his community.

When the public had started to gather, when there were victims, I mean, it was tragic scene.

Every direction was noise and confusion. But his garnell edged closer, his focus narrowed. He was looking for something specific.

I decided to see if my mother's car was there. I don't know why, but I started walking the perimeter, trying to ascertain whether, in fact I saw her car. They had it all roped off of the parking lot.

The barricades blocked his view. He strained to see through the maze of yellow tape and police.

As I approached the Jefferson Street side of the parking lot, I was able to just see just a faint, small part of the hood of a black vehicle. And it was in the handicaps spot, right up by the store, which is where my mother would have absolutely parked as close as she could, and the handicaps having the back.

Issues in that His thoughts began to race as his chest tightened.

I couldn't see the car. I got a detective. I described the car to him, got a detective to go into the scene and to identify the car, and that's how I found out that she was there.

For Garnell. It was a moment suspended between hope and dread. Was his mother among the victims? Had she made it out alive? The only way to know was to keep searching. As he looked for answers outside the store, the police response continued to build. At the top of that chain of command was the city's police commissioner.

My name is Joe Grimalia. I retired at the end of January of twenty twenty five. I was the commissioner for almost three years. Before that, I was a deputy commissioner and district chief. Before that, I was a homicide commander. That was a career Buffalo officer.

He knows its officers, its streets, and it struggles. Service ran through his family and for Joe, it had always been more than a job.

I like to say it's the family business. My father was a New York State trooper, my uncles were local officers, my cousins.

It's deep in the family roots.

I always idolized the profession and it was very singularly tracked that that's what I wanted to do.

But on the afternoon of May fourteenth, his experience and leadership were about to be tested in new ways. When the call first came in, he drove faster than he ever had before.

I don't live that far away, probably twelve to fifteen minutes of normal driving. I think I got there in about seven minutes.

Dispatcher calls kept coming through his radio. With every update, the numbers grew.

When I got Onseene, the gravity of the situation really hit me.

By two thirty six that afternoon, when Joe arrived, the gunman, an eighteen year old named Peyton Grendon, was already in handcuffs.

When the first call went out. We had three police officers in that parking lot, and I think it was about sixty four seconds from the time the nine to one one call went out, and the fourth police officer got into that parking lot just the mere seconds after that. They were able to get him into custody, got him in a car, and got him out of there very very quickly.

But even with a shooter apprehended, it wasn't clear if the danger was over. The first priority was to eliminate the possibility of a second shooter. Officers entered the store and carefully walked his aisles, not knowing if another gunman was waiting. Step by step, they moved in deeper. There were frightened choppers crouched behind shelves. Then the scope of the horror revealed itself, one victim, then another. The numbers

Our officers clearing the store once they were satisfied that there was no other shooters, no other danger in the store. Then you start looking at victims and the firefighters are going through, and it was very obvious that anyone else that had been shot in the store was an obvious fatal wound. The officer is as tough as this is. They have to advance past the wounded, They have to advance past everybody to make sure that there's nobody else

Firefighters stood by, ready to follow as soon as the path was clear. Once police confirmed that the store was saved to enter, firefighters served forward, turning their focus to the wounded.

They ran into the store and two of the surviving victims were inside the store. One of the surviving victims was outside the store, and they actually used a shopping cart to load the store manager into a shopping cart and push that cart out and got them evacuated from the store immediately and got him in an ambulance and got him out of there.

By the time Joe arrived, rescue efforts were already underway.

I was met by one of the command officers that just was shaking his head and trying to give me the rundown of what exactly was going on, And one of our veteran, seasoned homicide detectives said, come on, let me walk you through the scene.

He passed bodies still lying in the parking lot. Everywhere he looked were signs of panic and violence, frozen in place.

And walking around the store. It's something you'll just never unsee.

Every aisle showed signs of the devastation. As he walked through, the horror light music filled the store.

The in store music system was still playing, and it was early quiet in there.

An uncomfortable reminder of an ordinary day shattered in an instant. Shopping cards were overturned, shelves were left scattered, and officers, some of them barely holding it together.

As I was walking up, I remember some things very vividly, and one of those was an officer that was just completely overcome with emotion, and another officer was escorting him out of the store and taking him away from the scene.

The scene was difficult even for seasoned officers. The obvious violence was brutal, but there was also something else that made this hit close to home.

One of the victims that we lost, Aaron Salter, was a former Buffalo Police officer. He'd been retired for several years. He retired in two thousand eighteen, and there were numerous officers on scene that knew him.

Many officers knew the victims, some had worked alongside Aaron Salter. The images inside that store would not fait easily.

Our peer team was contacted almost immediately to get members, and they're an all volunteer peer team.

To look out for our.

Members, Counselors waited in the parking lot, meeting officers as they came out to ensure they were ready to keep going.

This is where I think police officers can sometimes be looked at differently. But we've got a job to do, and there's not to say that we're not human and officers aren't going to go through the various stages of emotion at the time, But you've got to maintain some control and I had a job to do, so I kind of had to snap myself into shape like every other officer on scene there, and we had to start working through that.

Joan needed to focus. There was still a city to comfort and keep under control. There was also the crime scene to manage, and a public waiting desperately for answers. A command post was set up across the street. The mayor and the FBI arrived. Within an hour, Jefferson Avenue had become the center of national attention. Reporters swarmed. Joe had to carve out a space where investigators could focus on what needed to be done as the outside world watched.

There was a kind of a vacant parking lot across the street from this location, and we established this as our command post.

The crowd was swelling, the parking lot was sealed, tensions were rising. That's when the two men finally came face to face.

While I'm in that command post, the former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, he came walking up to me. I said, hey, Garnell, he's like Joe, He's like, can you tell me if my mother's in the store. And that was like a gut punch, like froze, and I said, Garnel, I don't know. We don't have any of the identities of anybody that's in the story yet, but I said, look, stay here at the command bus, and as soon as I hear something,

For Garnell, the encounterset in motion of frantic search.

I still didn't know whether she had been shot or anything like that. So I talked to Joe Grimaudia. He assigned a lieutenant to me. Because they had evacuated maybe twenty five people from the store and taken them to police headquarters to debrief them. They did not have a list of names of those people, and so I went about to businesses, trying to ascertain whether, in fact, my mom was one of the persons who had been evacuated.

Hours passed without answers.

They hadn't locked the names of the people and had made them available, so it was tough getting any information from them.

Garnell had to find another way.

I got another detective. I asked him to go in and look and see if my mother was there. He needed a description of her. I had not seen her that morning, so I did not know what she had on, and I did not have a picture of her readily available. I didn't even think to look through my phone. So I called the nursing home. I got them to send me the video tape of the visitors from that morning. I knew my mom had gone to the nursing home, and so I got them to send the video to me.

And then came the silence, the kind every first responder knows too well.

When he didn't come back. I knew, you know what I'm saying. I mean, I knew I've done this a number of times myself, so I knew right away. And so with something he passed to the commissioner and to the others, people of the authority who were my peers. They gathered, and I had already set myself apart and was grieving. I knew exactly what was going on, and so they all came, Mayor and county exact and ology's people,

As Garneld Whitfield reeled from the news that his mother Ruth, was among the victims, the shock was also settling over the entire city. When the numbers were finally confirmed, the scale of the loss was overwhelming.

Ten died, three survived.

It was a massacre carried out with strategic planning, then broadcast live on the Internet as it unfolded. That choice was delivered bread a way to spread terror beyond Buffalo. As soon as law enforcement realized what was happening, the stream was taken down, but by then the damage was done. The images had already escaped into the world. The toll weight heaviest on the community. It had so deliberately targeted.

Eleven of the victims were black and two were white. One of the victims that was shot was in the pharmacy area and I guess was hit by a stray round if you will, suffered a grazing wound and was very fortunate. The other was the store manager. You had one woman there, one of the oldest victims, buying seeds for her garden. Springtime time to start getting gardens ready.

That woman was Garnell's mom.

You had other people that were there, obviously just getting their groceries. You had a victim that was working in the store that was the security guard, our former officer. You had one individual that was there buying a birthday cake for his three year old son.

The crowd around the market was growing by the hour.

The officers on scene were doing a tremendous job. They had the entire parking lot taped off, and what I saw was probably a couple hundred people on the outskirts of the parking lot, with more people starting to gather. One of the things that went through my mind immediately is this could be trouble. Did we have appropriate manpower in the event that people were going to start rushing the parking lot, and where emotions going to get the

For a moment. The question was whether raw grief might turn sorrow into unrest.

There was none of that. I said this time and time again in interviews, in both local and national interviews, that the one thing that I saw is that we we were all in this together. We suffered a loss, the community suffered a loss. Obviously the family members suffered the biggest loss. But it's like everybody was in this together. And I saw instances of our officers hugging and comforting people on the other side of the crime scene tape.

Media trucks continued to roll in with their satellite dishes aimed at the sky.

At the end of the night, we moved the command posts inside the parking lot. I totally underestimated the speed of the national media. Full studios were set up in that parking lot.

At the same time, investigators were uncovering details about the gunmen and looking for the motivation for his savagery.

Right off the bat, it was told that this was a racially motivated shooting because the weapons had writings all over them that identify with white supremacy replacement theory had the names of other shooters, other people that identified similarly with this shooter, So it was immediately known. There was no mistaking what the motive of this was. He's a young white male. You can look at the number of victims. Eleven of the thirteen were African American. You had two

In the chaos and pain of that first evening, the city still had to face the cameras and.

We had our first press conference at about five point thirty three hours after the shooting, and the mayor and myself called it for what it was. And I think that's something that the community has come to appreciate. And it's not because I'm saying that, it's because I've been told that numerous times. That we called it for what it was immediately at the first press conference, that this was a race motivated hate crime.

Let's be clear, this was an act of domestic terrorism motivated by hateful and perverse ideology that terrors at the soul of our nation. All Americans should reject the hateful lies that pit one race against another.

While city leaders were revealing the bigotry that motivated the attack, Garnell was left to bring the grim news back to his family.

My children work for the fire department, not all of them, but some of them do. My daughters were dispatchers on five fourteen. On that day, I had to call and get them relieve the duty.

The Whitfield family began assembling from far and wide.

I had to immediately start thinking about the rest of my family. My brother's down in Florida. He just ran straight to the airport and jumped on a flight and left everything unsettled.

Even as his own grief set in, Garnell was able to remain level headed.

I mean, that's what I'm trained to do, or the compartmentalized, or do whatever, and to focus on the mission. So that's my training, that's what I've always done, and actually that's what I'm still doing, you know.

But no training could block the reality. This wasn't someone else's tragedy, this was his own.

Right then, it was about my family, you know what I'm saying, making sure my family was okay, Because, like I say, I've seen a lot of things, have been exposed to death and tragedy, and have always been present at times like this in other people's lives, So I kind of knew what they would be going through, what they would be, you know, what would be happening with them, So that had to be the focus. You know, wasn't really time to grief, wasn't really time to process all

The crime soon drew in departments from outside the city, so there.

Were three agencies that were involved in this. You've got the homicide investigation, so our homicide detectors are going to do their scene processing and they're going to investigate the homicides for presentation to the local district attorney. But now you've got the FBI, who was immediately unseene that we're going to take over the racially motivated hate crime terrorism side of the investigation, and the New York State Police.

The agencies worked together, digging deeper into the government. They needed to figure out if he'd been acting alone.

From the federal side, which we were deeply involved with, you have to make sure that there's nobody else out there. Was he a loone actor, did he have help? Did he have anybody else? Is there going to be anybody else doing any other acts of violence anywhere else? Hence the reason why the New York State Police got search warrantson went into his home, and then the FBI getting their tech people out there and starting to dig into

Teams were dispatched with warrants, digging through the shooter's home and devices, searching for evidence and any sign of accomplices, and it didn't take long before they learned that this was a plan long in the making.

He was very methodical.

He knew exactly where he was going, what he was doing, how he was going to advance through the store. He put a lot of training into this, which really goes at the intentionality of this. With some moderate deviations, he went very much according to plan that was laid out in his discord diary how he wanted to stop the security guard because he knew that the store employed armed security, which were all former police officers, and he knew that they were going to be a challenge.

What investigators uncovered next was equal disturbing Tops was only meant to be one phase of a larger plot.

In reviewing the discord diary and manifesto, he had plans to go on to two other locations and continue to shoot, in his words and his diary, more black people along the way between Location one and two and Location two and three. We also know from his diary that he had an estimated body count that he was trying to achieve at each of these three locations. As catastrophic as this incident was, it could have been double and triple the size of that.

The horror inside Tops have been planned for months, including rehearsals and a final dry run the day before.

We know that this individual came to the store a couple months prior doing reconnaissance and surveying the store, and that was part of his diary. There's some older guys that like to hang out under the trees, there, and they've been doing that for a long time. But one guy in particular came up to us and said, I've seen that guy here before it goes. As matter of fact,

And were they average everyday conversations. Certainly nothing that the guy thought was odd at the time, right.

No, there was nothing that anyone missed that would have sent up signal flares of somebody to call.

What that surveillance revealed was elaborate planning. Uncovering everything they could about the shooting remained law enforcement's first priority.

The FBI had brought in their top evidence collection team. That team was flown in. The equipment was flown in the next day on Sunday.

Over the following days, federal specialists left no stone unturned.

I'm asking the special Agent charge of the Buffalo Field Office of the FBI how much longer he thought the store would be held as a crime scene. And he walked me through the store and showed me exactly what they're doing. I mean, the capabilities of the FBI and to recreate and the computerization, and they accounted for just about every single round and where it went.

And what became crystal clear was that the lives of so many people had been cut short, people just going about their everyday lives.

So as we're walking the store through the front of the store, back to the register where one of the victims, where that birthday cake was still sitting on the conveyor belt with the sun's birthday on there, it.

Just got a chill down my arm.

And you said it yeah, And that just unbelievably impactful on me.

As families grappled with grief, law enforcement set the table for again Dron's prosecution.

He was immediately brought back to the Homicide office, brought into a room, and the Chief Homicide Prosecutor and the homicide team reported rate the Buffalo Police Head Court and they took over.

On June second, twenty twenty two, Gendron was arraigned in state court on charges including murder, attempted murder, and hate crimes.

But top charge, aside from murder in the first degree, was the domestic terrorism motivated by hate, which was a relatively new charge in New York State, had never, to the best of my recollection, never been charged before, but most definitely had never been successfully prosecuted.

The case never went to trial. On November twenty eighth of that same year, Gendron Plit guilty. Three months later, he was sentenced to life without parole, but a separate federal case was still moving forward.

He is still facing federal charges, which that process is making its way through the federal courts, and he's facing the death penalty.

In the aftermath of the mass murder, Garnell's community reached far beyond Buffalo. The violence has tied him to other greeting families across the country. The crimes are all distinct, yet they all shared similar pain.

I've been all over this country. I've been with all of the families, Vivaldi, Sandy Hook, I've been all over the place Las Vegas. I've met a lot of these people, with a lot of these families, and a lot of these shootings happened in schools where you have young people who obviously pull out your heartstrings, and it's a huge problem. But one of the things I recognize is that Buffalo

He turned to a metaphor to express the loss.

Like if you have trees in your yard, and one's a sapling and one's a mature tree, the mature trees are deeply rooted. They provide sustenance, they provide fruit, they provide food, they provide protection for everything on And that's what we lost in Buffalo. That's who my mother was.

Even in their sixties, Garnelle and his siblings still realize how much they leaned on their mother.

We're just still discovering how intertwined and how connected and how dependent we all were on her, even at this age in our lives. We lived vicariously through her in some ways, and you don't realize what you have until it's gone.

Her absence has also brought a new kind of purpose.

My mother being a mature tree and me being under her protection, under her shade, if you would. The other thing about these trees in the forest is that everything under them, while it is protected, their growth is also stunned. And not until that tree is gone, those things under it really grow and reach their full potential and grow into whatever there issued to be. And so that's the

What happened in Buffalo is not a one time anomaly. It is tied to other similar tragedies across the US, all involved lone gunmen, radicalized online striking with heat filled intent.

Nearly sixty people are dead and more than five hundred injured after a man started shooting into the crowd.

At a country music festival in Las Vegas, Nevada.

Downtown Charleston is a sea of police lights and crime scene tape inside the historic em Manual Ame Church. A lone gunman described as a white male in his twenties. He's believed to have opened fire, ultimately killing nine people before fleeing.

Okay, so you were in the walmart.

I'm just happy.

We had just walked in past the produce section and we were going to the freezer foods, like where the frozen dinners are.

But I heard.

Doo doo doo, and then it went do do do do.

Like closer together, So then that's when I thought it was gunshot.

What happened at Tops was hate in its most lethal form, all carried out by just one person. Michael Jensen, a researcher who tracks terrorism, says that what makes this modern era distinct is the rise of individual terrorists versus groups.

One of the other features that really kind of separates this movement from past ones. Is this moving beyond these autonomous cells to individual actors? Right, It's a lone actor driven environment in which a single individual can take it upon themselves to engage in act of violence on the behalf of a broader movement, and not only that, they can do it in a way that is very low in sophistication and very hard to detect, but very very effective.

The most common form of terror is no longer the bomb plot or coordinated hijacking.

It's someone within easily acquired assault rifle walking into a public place that has no security deterrence and opening fire. That's very, very difficult to detect and to respond to. But the effect is the same, the fear that it causes, the attention that it generates.

This kind of violence has become part of the national news cycle, and that too feeds the problem.

They're always in the headlines because these attacks are happening so frequently, and for these movements, they see that as a good thing, right, that they're being talked about, their ideas are being talked about. They're reaching new audiences, they're drawing in new communities into their online spaces where they can rapidly radicalize them.

What once might have been considered rare is now recurring with alarming regularity.

This trend towards lone actor extremism will can continue. The Internet is going to continue to play a massive role in radicalizing individuals and getting them involved in these groups. In these movements, communication technology is not going anywhere, and it's been highly effective in growing the groups, and they will look to leverage.

That these singular actors are no longer the exception, they're the norm. As such, law enforcement has been forced to learn new ways to combat this reality. For Jeremy Sensky, a survivor of the twenty twenty five New Orleans attack, the threat of a lone wolf strike wasn't abstract. It was the sound of a truck on Bourbon Street barreling into a crowd on New Year's Day. We heard his story in episode one. That attack is a prime example of what modern terrorism looks like.

Nobody was with me.

I was by myself. My wife had went back to the room with my daughter, and I was on my way back to the room. I was almost to Canal Street. I mean we're talking maybe ninety seconds. I would have been on Canal Street and I wouldn't even this would have never.

Happened ninety seconds. That was the difference between walking back into a hotel room or being struck head on.

The first cough that came over to me, I said, my legs, my legs, my legs, And I was like, what happened? He said, we don't know. You were trying to assess this situation. He just looked at me and said, you're lucky to be alive. Everyone around you is dead.

Yet Jeremy's survival wasn't guaranteed.

Somebody came over to my head and put a yellow ax on my head, So I guess there's different coatings they put on your head for like the condition you're in, how fast they got to get you, or something like that. Yellow is better than red. Red's the worst. And then I think there's green, and then I think there's one that means you're basically deceased.

That X meant that his injuries didn't appear life threatening, at least not yet.

They had changed my yellow axe to a red X in the ambulance because I had lost so much blood and my legs were so bad that I became like a party.

In all around him. Others fared even worse.

I heard somebody screaming, we found someone over here, we found someone in there.

We needed to do CPR.

I've heard people say.

We lost them.

Basically, I was like one of the last people they had attended to in my area.

As Jeremy was being rushed to the hospital, his family had no idea what had happened. His wife, Crystal, tried reaching him.

There was no answer, and I was a little concerned, but not too too concerned, because he could have got sidetracked on the way home.

The not knowing is an entirely different type of fear. She couldn't just go to bed. Crystal is Jeremy's wife but also his caregiver ever since he was in an accident in nineteen ninety nine that paralyzed him, so she had been nervously waiting up for him that night.

So I'm like, I'm awake. Now he's got to be on his way, so I'll just lay here and watch TV.

Then an uneasy feeling grew once she picked up the remote.

So I turned the TV on and I'm like flipping the stations, and I happened to stop on something where they were talking about it on the news, and I'm like, oh, is that in New Orleans? And then I realized, I'm like, God, that's in New Orleans. And then I started to panic. My daughter had laid back down, and I went in her room and I'm like, something is seriously wrong. There's something wrong. There's some major thing happening.

At that point, they started scrambling for answers.

My daughter and I are putting shoes on. We were staying right off a canal, maybe like a block from Bourbon, so as soon as we went outside of the hotel, we could see like just firetrucks and police and.

Everything from the street. There were no signs of Jeremy. Their search next led to the hospital.

They kept asking them for the guy in woelchair, and no one associated me with a guy in woelchair because it wasn't No one actually saw me in a woelchair.

And finally the head nurse was walking by and she stopped in mid track and she was like, oh, my god, I just talked to him. He's okay.

By morning, the world had already seen the wreckage, and in the hours after the attack, friends and family started calling Crystal. They'd seen a viral photo spreading online.

One of the reasons why we were so quick to go to Facebook is because the morning that had happened, people were calling us starting six o'clock in the morning, like when they woke up, because that was Jeremy's chair in that picture, and that's what was going around was the picture of the truck with his chair next to it.

Jeremy's chair is Jeremy's wheelchair. He relies on it for mobility. It was an expensive blue chair with his fanny pack still clipped to the seatbelt. Anyone who knew Jeremy would recognize it instantly.

A lot of family and friends were reaching out asking is this Jeremy? Is this Jeremy?

The chair was more than an identifying marker. It might have also saved Jeremy's life.

His wheelchair weighs so much that it would stop the truck. And I know that that sounds insane, but what people don't realize is that he doesn't have like your normal electric wheelchair that your grandpa has. Even without him in the chair. That chair weighs over three hundred pounds and all the weight is in the.

Base of it. And now it makes sense too. When Jeremy was telling me that he didn't think his chair moved very much, that whatever the impact was propelled him. Because the picture his wheelchair is right there within feet of the truck.

Yeah, and I mean, of course that lift stopped the truck. But it just makes sense that that guy hitting that chair had to have caused him to lose somewhat control. Like when he hit people, they just either went underneath or over the top. Jeremy didn't go underneath or over the top of that car. He flew, but the chair did not. The chair was still on all four wheels.

The chair absorbed the impact. Jeremy's body did the rest.

But it's the bottom part of his legs that were just like mangled. And it's like being hit by a truck, standing against a boulder or a wall and your leg's gonna shatter.

Recovery would take months.

My biggest thing was just trying to get my legs strong so I don't have to worry about him breaking or I feel like com fragile right now.

Basically, Crystal saw something few others understood. Jeremy's paralysis spared him much of the expected physical agony.

He wasn't in that much pain. I mean, of course, he was because he had black eyes and stuff like he got beat up, But as to his injuries, he couldn't feel any of it. So he was completely coherent, like when he says he was laying on the side of the street and next to the truck like, he was able to be so coherent that he was able to try to even though he was confused about what was going on, he was not in any pain to make him delirious.

That clarity meant he absorbed every detail, and in the weeks after that, trauma followed him home.

Noises like loud vehicles. There's a lot of people that road their trucks up or rub their cars up, and anythink it's cool. I guess it is cool if you like that kind of thing. I used to go to motorcycle races a lot, and truck pulls and stuff like that. But whenever I'm going down the street and I hear that noise, I'll turn around, look and find out and see what tell's coming towards me.

Now, the street noise was one thing, but when he closed his eyes, the entire attack became vivid.

Just screaming on the street in the sound, that sound of that vehicle when it turned off canal as soon as it hit that straightaway and made that noise, It's just the thunking of people.

As the weeks passed, Jeremy tried to make sense of why he had survived while so many others hadn't.

Yeah, life's long fair. People tell me I'm glad to be alive, and there's a purpose for me. God wants me here for something. I keep thinking, if that's true, then it has to be something to me, like trying to fight terrorism. But I don't know how the Pholas fight terrorism. In my position, it is a question.

He still wrestles with what it means to survive an act of hate and how to live with the memories.

It's very sad that people would kill me, multiple people of a religion, or for any reason at all, but to do it in the name of some kind of religion. I do think about it all the time, and it just destroys everybody's confidence and everything, and it makes people hate other people.

The perpetrator took lives and left scars that will never fully heal. But for Jeremy, the only path forward is resolved and refusing to let hate win.

I mean, I'm not going to live my life like I'm afraid to go anywhere else.

So some I'm not going to do that.

They say, what if you do that, the terrorists win. I'm not afraid to go anywhere like I have friends that don't even leave their house at the time. They're afraid to go anywhere. And I go to concerts.

I love to do stuff there.

You only live one time, and no matter what handicaps I have, I'm going to do whatever I can, however I can.

In New Orleans, it wasn't a foreign network or a coordinated cell. It was one man acting alone, weaponizing the ordinary, a truck and a crowded street to cause maximum fear and destruction. He embodied the new face of extremism, the lone actor, radicalized and determined, capable of turning an everyday space into a scene of terror. Law enforcement has evolved

We're going to have more events, There's no question about it that it's going to happen.

You need to project a.

Positive response and basically maintain your way of life.

There's evil out there and it has to be defeated when you see it.

It can't be coddled, it can't be excused. It has to be defeated.

We are all going to have things happen in our life that are out of our control, that are bad. But you always have control of a response. Even in the moments where I was buried alive, I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything. I had my mind, I could think, I could get my mind on something different. I could control that. That has been helpful for me.

Anyway.

If we let it alter the rhythm of our days, then the violence echoes beyond the attack, because the moment fear changes our day to day. Their mission is complete, and behind every headline, every case we've told this season, there are teams of people working tirelessly and often invisibly, agents, analysts, prosecutors and local police. Together, they carry the fight forward to keep the peace, to bring justice, and to make sure the next attack is stopped before it begins.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts. Our host is Anna Sega Nicolazzi. The show was written by Cooper Mall, Executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliott Wolf, and Steve Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts. Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk. This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazzi. Our