32 | September/October 2022 | BAEC Bulletin described the Buffalo shooter as a “disaffected 18-year-old” and in the autopsies that detailed bullet wounds to the head and in the community forums he’d begun attending about America’s epidemic of mass shootings. One night after he left his law office, he met with six other community leaders to discuss potential solutions to gun violence. “How many of these attacks have we had just since Buffalo?” asked one pastor, as they sat together inside a church the shooter had reportedly visited and scouted as a potential target days before the attack at Tops.
school.”
They sat in silence for a moment as Elmore remembered the rest of that senior year. He’d taken over his father’s window cleaning business along with his younger brother to help make up for the family’s lost income and started driving his mother to work because she didn’t have her driver’s license. His father, a former All-Navy athlete who’d been the city’s first black firefighter, had finally come home from the hospital in a wheelchair with a missing finger, muscle tremors and a concave dent on the top of his head. “One day you’re a carefree high school kid, and the next you’re a freaking adult,” Elmore said.
“At least three off the top of my head,” an anti-gun activist said.
“It’s rinse-repeat, and that’s been going on for what, a decade?”
“You must have been so angry,” the pastor said.
“Forty-seven years,” Elmore said. The other men turned to look at him. They’d met several times to address gun trafficking and endemic gun violence in Buffalo, but Elmore had never told them exactly how he’d come to care. “During my senior year, the first FBI-documented high school shooting happened at my school in Olean,” he said. “The shooter was actually a classmate of mine. He lived right down the block.” “You’re kidding. I’ve never even heard of it,” the pastor said, so Elmore began to tell them about Anthony Barbaro, and how he’d sneaked into the high school during winter vacation on Dec. 30, 1974, shot and killed a janitor on the third floor, and then broken into the empty student council room that offered the best view of the surrounding neighborhood. Barbaro was the top marksman on the school’s rifle team, and he attached a telescopic sight to his long-range Remington rifle and started firing out the window and onto the street. Elmore had just gotten home from basketball practice when he heard the first reports come over the police scanner that his father, a firefighter, kept near the kitchen table. “Multiple gunshots. One victim down,” the police dispatcher said. Elmore listened on the scanner as first responders called in to say they were heading to the scene — local police, state troopers, the National Guard, and also the city’s No. 42 firetruck, driven by Elmore’s father, Herb. “Two minutes out,” he heard his father say. He listened to the sound of at least a dozen more shots over the scanner, and then he thought he heard someone shout his father’s name. “We need help in the firetruck. Victim is critical,” someone said, and Elmore and his family kept listening and waiting for that help to arrive as Barbaro continued to fire. He shot at a gas company worker and then shot and killed a pregnant woman who happened to be driving by. Police officers tried to return fire with their pistols, but they realized they were outgunned and then took cover behind a wall. An ambulance driver arrived on the scene, and then turned around and drove off when the ambulance was hit by gunfire. Finally, the National Guard brought in a tank to help remove the victims, and Elmore and his mother rushed to the hospital. Three people were dead and 11 more were injured, including his father, who’d been shot once in his index finger and once directly through the top of his head. “He had skull and bullet fragments embedded into his brain,” Elmore said. “He survived, but he came out different. His left side was paralyzed. He was crippled for the rest of his life.”
“I’m still angry,” he said.
He’d spent years sorting through the fallout of that mass shooting, and here he was again back at the very beginning, meeting in his office with a mortician and the family of another Buffalo victim he’d come to represent. Kat Massey, 72, had been buried after a funeral with a full viewing: eyes closed, lipstick freshly applied, her body at rest under an ornate blanket. “The very picture of peace,” one of the eulogists had said that day, but now Elmore wanted to know more about what Massey had looked like before, when she first arrived at the funeral home in a blue body bag. “One thing we’re trying to establish with this case is the brutality of this weapon,” Elmore told the mortician, Alan Core. “At some point we might want to show what an AR-15 can do to the human body.” Core winced and looked across the couch at Barbara Massey, Kat’s sister and next-door neighbor. “Some things shouldn’t even be whispered out loud,” Core said. “It’s terrible to talk about, but people need to understand the ugliness,” Elmore said. “You’re one of the few people who knows the truth. You saw the before, and you gave us the after.” “Oh, well, I don’t —” Core said, and then he closed his eyes and shook his head. “Kat hated guns,” Barbara told him. “It’s okay. She would have wanted us to do everything possible to stop this insanity.” Core played with the knot in his tie and considered how much to say. In three decades as a mortician, he had done the embalming and restorative work to enable open-casket viewings for the victims of motorcycle crashes, train-track suicides, drag-racing accidents and domestic violence murders, but he’d never encountered anything as violent as what he’d seen the morning after the shooting. He’d transported three bodies from the medical examiner’s office to the locked-and-refrigerated room in the back of his funeral home, unzipped the bags, and studied the remains of three elderly black women he had known and prayed with, and who happened to be shopping at Tops at the same time. Core was accustomed to dealing with the worst results of gun violence. Twenty percent of his business came because of shooting deaths, and he knew how to repair and disguise the bullet-sized entry and exit wounds of a 9mm, but he’d never witnessed the impacts of a semiautomatic rifle. Some of the victims in his funeral home had been shot multiple times, and the entry and exit wounds were the size of baseballs. The force
“Oh, no,” the pastor said.
“It was different in those days,” Elmore said. “No prayer vigil. No counseling. We never really talked about it. We just went back to
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