BAEC Bulletin | September/October 2022 | 31
The case of a lifetime For a Buffalo lawyer, the investigation of one mass shooting leads him back to another By Eli Saslow Originally published in the Washington Post, August 7, 2022
BUFFALO — John Elmore’s newest clients had come to his law office in the last weeks to review their relatives’ autopsy reports, plan funerals and meet with investigators from the FBI, but lately they had also started showing up sometimes for seemingly no reason at all. Andrea Beckman parked outside a quiet strip mall, walked in a partially vacant office building, and knocked on her attorney’s door. “Is it okay if I sit in here for a while?” she asked, and Elmore, 65, looked up from his computer and motioned to the chair across from his desk.
“Of course,” he said. “Do you need anything?”
“Just distraction. Just noise,” she said. “I’m still not doing that well when I’m at home by myself.” It had been almost two months since her father went to buy a birthday cake for his 3-year-old son at a Tops grocery store and was shot and killed along with nine others, forcing Andrea to begin looking for a lawyer for the first time in her life. Her family knew of only one attorney in the Black community of East Buffalo — the one whose billboard towered above a gas station near Tops and whose slogan repeated in radio advertisements. “When they hurt you, I got you,” Elmore said. His personal injury practice consisted mostly of filing lawsuits for car accidents, dog bites, and slip-and-falls, and now he’d also come to represent several families of victims in a white supremacist terrorist attack that he considered the “most personal case of my career.” He’d often shopped at that same Tops. He knew several of the victims from church or from his children’s youth sports leagues. And he had some idea of what it might be like for his clients to sort through the rage and the trauma of a mass shooting, because even four decades after another long-forgotten shooting, he was still doing that, too.
published racist diatribes and live-streamed a video of the attack; and against a body armor company that marketed its gear directly to civilians and sold the shooter a steel-plated vest that protected him from a security guard’s return fire; and against the manufacturer of his Bushmaster XM-15, which had been used to fire 30 shots in the first 20 seconds of the attack, and which the shooter wrote that he’d selected as his weapon of choice because it was a “dreaded military grade assault rifle” and “very deadly.” Elmore had decided to partner on the case with the Giffords Law Center to Prevent Gun Violence and with Josh Koskoff, a Connecticut lawyer who’d won a $73 million settlement against gun manufacturer Remington Arms after the same style of semiautomatic weapon was used in the 2012 Sandy Hook Elementary School shooting. Koskoff had argued that Remington marketed its semiautomatic rifle specifically to impressionable young men, but the resolution of that case had taken almost a decade, and Elmore had cautioned his clients that their own lawsuit — if they even had one — would likely drag on for several years. “Did you see Tops is reopening this week?” Andrea said. “They replaced the broken windows and redesigned it. It’s going back to being a regular grocery store.”
“How’s your family?” he asked. “How’s everyone holding together?”
“You know,” she said. “We’re all kind of spiraling.”
“Some people are lucky enough to move on,” Elmore said.
“What’s going on with your uncle? He called me last night at 1:30 in the morning, and he sounded a little confused.” “Yeah, sorry about that. He’s in the hospital. They’re saying he basically had a mental breakdown from all of this.” “Ugh. Poor guy,” Elmore said, as he reached into his desk for a yellow legal pad to take notes, because this was now the fulcrum of his work: to make a full accounting of the ever-expanding damages caused by yet another American mass shooting and then decide where and how to assign blame beyond the alleged shooter, Payton Gendron. Elmore had begun to explore potential lawsuits against social media websites, where the shooter had
“It’s feels like nobody even talks about what happened in Buffalo anymore. It was a big deal for a few weeks, and now it’s gone.” “I actually have some experience with that,” Elmore said, and he paused for a moment, trying to decide how much further to go. “Let me ask you something,” he said. “Did you ever hear about a mass shooting in Olean, New York?” It was something he’d almost never talked about, but so much about the Tops shooting kept bringing him back to that day. His memories of Olean resurfaced in criminal records that
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