Payton Gendron, the white supremacist who killed 10 Black people at a Buffalo supermarket, may be facing his own death after federal prosecutors announced Friday they intend to seek capital punishment.

It marks the first time the Justice Department under President Joe Biden has authorized a new attempt at the death penalty. While the state of New York does not have capital punishment, the department received an opportunity to seek the penalty in a separate federal hate crimes case against Gendron.

The 20-year-old is already serving a life sentence without parole after pleading guilty to state charges of murder and hate-motivated domestic terrorism related to the 2022 attack.

He traveled over 200 miles from his home in Conklin, N.Y., to a Tops Friendly Market in Buffalo’s East Side, a predominantly Black neighborhood, to carry out the shooting.

Trini Ross, the U.S. attorney for western New York, cited the intentional decision that went into the massacre, saying the location was meant to “maximize the number of Black victims,” according to documents that announced the decision to seek death.

Eight supermarket customers were killed, in addition to the store security guard and a church deacon who transported shoppers to and from the store. Three other individuals were wounded in the attack but survived.

The decision to seek the death penalty was met with mixed reactions from family members of the victims. Some relatives released a joint statement through their attorneys, saying the decision “provides a pathway to both relief and a measure of closure for the victims and their families.”

But Mark Talley, whose 63-year-old mother, Geraldine Talley, died in the attack, said he would have preferred Gendron spend his life in prison.

“It would have satisfied me more knowing he would have spent the rest of his life in prison being surrounded by the population of people he tried to kill,” he said.

Gendron’s attorney, Sonya Zoghlin, criticized the decision, emphasizing that he was 18 at the time of the shooting and suggesting that the government’s efforts would be better spent addressing factors that facilitated the crime. He pointed to the “easy access to deadly weapons and the failure of social media companies to moderate the hateful rhetoric and images that circulate online” as factors that contributed to the killing.

With News Wire Services