34 | September/October 2022 | BAEC Bulletin
owned or carried a gun again. He’d taken on murder trials and death penalty cases, losing himself in other people’s traumas and returning to Olean every few weeks to visit his father until he died at age 64 of a cancer that doctors said was potentially related to the bullet fragments still embedded into his brain. “We had a lot of good years stolen,” Elmore said. “I try to be a positive person, but I’ve been thinking about that.” “Sure, because you’re living it again,” Robert said, and Elmore nodded. “I can already tell this case is going to age me,” he said. “It’s pressure. It’s late nights and seeing so much grief.”
each of Gendron’s court appearances to keep track of the legal proceedings. She’d mowed her sister’s lawn, weeded the flower bed, dusted the house, organized the photo albums, and cut the grass again. “I like to feel like things are moving forward,” she told Elmore. “I need to be busy. It’s the only thing that helps.” “That was me, too,” Elmore said. “As long as I had a job to do, I could act like I was okay.” “I have moments when I think I’m starting to do a little better,” Barbara said. “I’ve been listening to what the pastors say when they talk about forgiveness. It sounds right to me. I try. But each time I see him walk into court, my whole body starts to shake. I feel like his eyes should be glued open, there should be mirrors put in front of him, and then I’d like to shoot that little maggot in the back of his head.” She squeezed the table. “I’m sorry,” she said. “This has opened up a rage and a despair inside me that I didn’t even know I owned.” “His justice is coming,” Elmore said, and he began to update her on the case. Gendron was facing murder charges in New York and 27 federal counts for hate crimes and firearm charges. His defense team had entered a plea of “not guilty” and requested a one-year delay, which meant the criminal case would last a long time and the civil cases would last much longer, but the timeline that concerned Barbara was more fundamental. “Some days it hurts so bad I don’t know how much longer I can take it. When does it end?” she asked, and 47 years later, Elmore thought he knew the answer.
“Plus the violence,” Robert said.
“Here we are 50 years later, still dealing with the same problems,” Elmore said, and he pushed away his empty coffee cup and thought for a moment about the similarities between the mass shootings in Buffalo and Olean: two disaffected teenagers armed with militaristic weapons, each firing more than 30 shots into a public space, targeting random strangers and transforming entire families in ways Elmore thought his clients were only beginning to comprehend. It seemed to him that a mass shooting created its own kind of cavitation effect — everything flung apart upon impact and then rebounding into place broken, torn, swollen, stretched, altered. “He was really holding his head together all that time?” Elmore asked again. “He was alert? He was conscious?”
His brother nodded.
“Two hours,” Elmore said again, and he touched his head and looked at a clock in the diner, watching the seconds pass. “How much longer will all of this last?” Barbara Massey asked one day as she sat in Elmore’s office a few months after shooting. She’d been filling her days by responding to all 430 condolence letters mailed to her sister’s house. She’d gone in person to
“I’m not sure that it does,” he said. •
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