East Side residents from neighborhoods surrounding Tops Supermarket at 1275 Jefferson Avenue — the site of the May 14, 2022 white supremacist mass shooting — gathered at the Merriweather Library Saturday, May 16 seeking answers surrounding millions of dollars earmarked for victims, survivors and East Side residents affected by the massacre.
Ground Zero Speaks was a community conference organized by Dominique Calhoun, an auditor, senior paralegal and legal consultant who lived on Laurel Street, just minutes away from the supermarket. She was on her way to the grocer with her daughters when she learned of the shooting. She moved to Atlanta, Georgia in 2023, but the aftermath of the tragedy followed her.
"The defense started to reach out to witnesses, the directly impacted, the family members to get their opinions on the death penalty, and so a lot of us were re-traumatized," she said.
Calhoun was among several impacted individuals who sought help from organizations that received grants from the Buffalo Together Fund. She said she was seeking mental health resources due to the trauma of the impending trial against murderer Payton Gendron. To her surprise, she said, she couldn't find an organization to provide her with the services she needed.
"The things that were supposed to be paid for, for our stabilization, were never provided, such as rental assistance and counseling and back utility bills," Calhoun said. "It was hurtful to find out this money was poured in, in order to help us with our trauma, and we're still dealing with it."
After getting in touch with other residents and survivors who said they were either denied or unable to locate services and resources, she came back to Buffalo to lead a conversation of accountability, open to the public.
Among attendees was Athenia Cyrus, whose father owns a business on Jefferson Avenue. She questioned what locally operated nonprofits are doing with funds they collected to help the community.
"You are leading Black nonprofit organizations, and you can't get people to distribute money?" she said. "You can't get people to make sure our streetscapes happen? You can't get people to fill the wedge in the gap of government funding that they won't give us because we don't have the funding?"
Now, transparency is being demanded by way of legal proceedings. After attempting to correspond with the Buffalo Together board since February, Calhoun filed a petition against the Buffalo Together Community Response Fund, Buffalo Together Inc., the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo and the United Way of Buffalo & Erie County "in the interest of transparency, accountability and proper administration of charitable funds raised in response to the tragedy," according to her filing.
Aaron Saykin, a partner at Hodgson Russ LLP representing both the Community Foundation for Greater Buffalo and Buffalo Together, sent a statement to BTPM NPR calling Calhoun's lawsuit "legally baseless."
"The decline and disinvestment of the East Side did not happen overnight, nor can it be fixed overnight. And Buffalo Together remains committed to sustained investment that uplifts the East Side, honors its strengths, and creates lasting change," he said.
But some individuals directly impacted by the tragedy say they still don't see the change, especially for the most vulnerable members of the community.
"There are people on that victims' list that were not helped that are now incarcerated because they had to deal with poverty," said Mercedes Overstreet, who oversees the HEAT youth mentoring program. "So whoever's watching this, whoever's thinking about this, ask yourself, how you going to handle white supremacy? You're going to keep tucking your tail or are you going to support the youth that's genuinely being affected?"
Julie Harwell barely made it out of Tops Supermarket while her daughter was hiding in a freezer with her father. Harwell and her daughter made national headlines in the wake of the tragedy. Today, she says she doesn't have much to show for it.
"It's crazy to me, because I haven't gotten help for my daughter, no scholarship for her, nobody reached out to her; just for interviews," Harwell said.
Another community conversation on accountability and transparency surrounding 5/14-related funding is scheduled for June 6.
