CONKLIN, N.Y. — Not long after the police identified a suspect in the racist massacre at a Buffalo grocery store, the phones in some local government offices here started ringing. On the other end were people making threats, enraged because they assumed that the suspect’s hometown near the Pennsylvania border, some 200 miles from the scene of the shooting, had stoked his racism.
The reality, according to some elected officials and former classmates of the suspect in Broome County, an area of rolling hills in the northern reaches of Appalachia, is different. The community has had its share of racial tensions in recent years as it has grown more diverse, not unlike other places across the United States.
But in interviews last week, the officials and classmates said they could not see how those issues had played a part in causing the man, a recent graduate of Susquehanna Valley High School, to target Black people in a shooting on May 14 at Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo, killing 10 and wounding three more.
The gunman himself seemed to confirm as much, writing in a 180-page screed that he posted online that he had come to his racist views on the internet — not in Conklin, the suburb of Binghamton in New York’s Southern Tier where he was raised.
