On May 14, 2022, the City of Buffalo’s history was rewritten. It was a new chapter of darkness born from a racially motivated mass shooting at 1275 Jefferson Avenue: A Tops Supermarket, one of very few large grocers on the city’s predominantly Black East Side.
With Buffalo on the world stage, thousands of people poured in condolences, tributes and promises to help devastated members of its community. They also poured in money. Lots of it.
But four years after the attack that claimed 10 lives, injured three others and left lasting harm across Buffalo’s Black community, some of those most affected are still asking: What is there to show for all of the promises and, more importantly, the money?
This is Part II of our investigative series titled "Where Did The Money Go?" Read Part I here.
"It's hard on me. Definitely hard, because I live right there, and anytime I come out the house, I'm going to see that, and that's the first place my eyes go, even if I don't think about it. So it's horrible, this is horrible." — Grady Lewis, a 5/14 survivor
The sight of 1275 Jefferson Avenue, once a symbol of victory after residents fought for a grocery store to come to their neighborhood, is now a trigger for many who live nearby. But it’s not only the sight of Tops Supermarket that evokes trauma for the residents there. It’s the sight of empty lots and decrepit buildings down Jefferson Avenue. It’s the belief that, for as much that changed on May 14th, 2022, the area itself hasn't changed.
Droves of people and money flooded Buffalo’s East Side, planting seeds of hope for renewal and a community made whole after suffering a racist act of domestic terrorism. Behind podiums and in front of cameras, promises were made.
But as the months turned into years, some residents and survivors began asking a harder question: Who really benefited from the money, attention and goodwill that followed the massacre?
"You have community projects that never touch the community or involve people in the community. You have people building careers, brands, reputations all saying they’re helping the people of the East Side, off the pain of Black Buffalo, but they have nothing to show for it." — Mark Talley, son of Geraldine Talley, who was killed on 5/14
We started off looking at major financial contributions and promises that flooded the East Side following the massacre.
Most of the donations I could track moved through two major funds: the Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund, which provided direct financial assistance to victims’ families, survivors and Tops employees; and the Buffalo Together Fund, which supported nonprofit relief work and longer-term community investment.
Other funds are difficult to track because so many dollars moved through so many local organizations — and following those dollars means also following what services, programs and resources those organizations provided.
Before you can measure the impact, you have to know who was funded in the first place. How many organizations received money to help survivors and community members? The answer is hard to find.
Buffalo Together alone selected 86 organizations to fund, but some nonprofits appeared repeatedly across donation records and funding announcements. I identified groups and initiatives that received post-5/14 support from three or more major sources.
"Even when faced with unimaginable tragedy, and let's be honest, it was colored by hateful, racism and despicable violence. You did not return hate with hate." — New York Attorney General Letitia James at this year's 5/14 remembrance ceremony
Addressing food insecurities after 5/14 and beyond
The massacre wasn’t just an act of mass violence; it was a racist attack on Buffalo’s Black community. In response, multiple donors directed their giving towards legacy institutions such as Buffalo Juneteenth and the African-American Cultural Center. Those gifts were part of the broader response to racial harm. However, they fall under a different category than direct aid to victims, survivors or residents seeking immediate support.
Four nonprofits that repeatedly received funding were working together to serve residents during one of the most urgent periods. The goal was partnering to provide food and other necessities during the temporary closure of the Jefferson Avenue Tops Supermarket.
These organizations were the Resource Council of Western New York, Buffalo Go Green, FeedMore Western New York and the African Heritage Food Co-Op.
"We’re stepping in and stepping up for our community and we want to make sure people can eat and they have more than just food, though," said Alexander Wright, then-general manager and co-founder of the African Heritage Food Co-Op, days after the attack.
The Resource Council of Western New York received six notable funding streams. One was the widely reported $3 million in state funding earmarked for its operation of the Buffalo United Resiliency Center.
In public New York State Comptroller records, the state Office of Victim Services had a $10 million contract with the Resource Council of Western New York for the Buffalo Resiliency Center. Those records show spending to date at just over $100,000 dollars.
The contract record lists a start date of Oct. 1, 2021 — more than seven months before the 2022 massacre. Retroactive contract dates are not unheard of in New York State grant contracting, but the date raises questions about whether the record reflects an administrative funding period, an amended contract, a data-entry issue, or some other explanation.
Also unclear is what happened to the unspent portion of that contract and whether any of that money was transferred, reassigned or otherwise made available to the Community Health Center of Buffalo and the Buffalo Urban League, which, as Part I reported, now jointly operate the Buffalo United Resiliency Center.
The Resource Council of Western New York did not respond to calls or emails seeking clarification about the contract and why the resiliency center changed hands.
Buffalo Go Green received grants from the Buffalo Together Fund, the KeyBank Foundation, and the Buffalo Bills and NFL Foundation. The nonprofit also received $25,000 from a General Mills grant administered by the United Way of Buffalo and Erie County.
FeedMore Western New York received four donations totaling $260,000, the largest being $100,000 from Delta Sonic.
The African Heritage Food Co-Op wasn’t just funded for supporting temporary food distribution. It was funded for promise. A Black-owned and -operated cooperative established in direct response to food apartheid on Buffalo’s East Side.
After the massacre, the co-op came to represent something larger than emergency aid. It was the possibility of what recovery could look like, both in and of the community. The co-op received grants from Buffalo Together, the KeyBank Foundation, the Buffalo Bills and NFL Foundation. It also received a $3 million commitment from New York State to help fund its flagship Buffalo location at 238 Carlton Street, a plan in the making since 2019.
That building remains vacant today. And the co-op’s emergency food distribution has slowed from the pace it maintained in the immediate aftermath of the massacre.
Reverend Kinzer Pointer, former board president and current CEO of the African Heritage Food Co-Op, said the nonprofit received about $100,000 total in donations. As for the state funding, he said one major holdup keeping both the Carlton Street Project and the millions of dollars attached to it in limbo has to do with the city.
Pointer said the $3 million is for the construction, but the City of Buffalo has yet to hand out a building permit.
"The state has kept its word and trust," he said. "I'm telling you that this delay right now is entirely the City of Buffalo."
While the wait for the $3 million continues, Pointer said the remaining funds received went toward procuring and distributing free fruit and vegetables in the community and support local food pantries.
"We couldn't afford to be putting anything away for a rainy day," he said. "People are hungry."
That kind of need is as urgent as it was four years ago.
'It has changed me.'
Although 5/14 further exposed food insecurity on Buffalo’s East Side, the impact of the tragedy was never just about food. It exposed other needs, too; from mental health care and financial assistance to support for people whose injuries or trauma made it harder to work.
Support was promised by a number of organizations that received money to help impacted individuals. And, for some people, those needs have never gone away.
Grady Lewis, the East Side resident who had a conversation with a stranger on May 13, 2022 and witnessed that stranger carry out one of the most horrific acts the City of Buffalo had ever seen the day after, was deemed ineligible for compensation from the Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund on the grounds law enforcement couldn’t verify his presence.
"That was the scariest thing I've ever seen in my life," said Lewis, recalling 5/14. "When it was happening, I thought, 'OK, they filming a movie because they make movies here in Buffalo.' That's how my brain registered it until he went into the store. That's when I realized that, no, this is real. He's really shooting people."
Lewis was denied not only financial relief, but an opportunity to heal.
Since that day, he’s been trying to adapt to a new normal, one that looks nothing like the freedom he had before. Part of that process has meant seeking support from nonprofits that received generous donations to help people like him.
"I go to counseling," he said. "My counselor said I'm doing better now, but I'm still a little jumpy. I love my art therapy that I do on Tuesdays. I didn't think I would want to do it, but actually, after doing it, it's like, OK, I get a chance to be free for again for an hour and a half.
"It has changed me."
Lewis' story shows how resiliency – in several contexts – can feel less like healing and more like harm to those who live with the aftermath of the massacre every day.
"I want to be restored, but they want me to be resilient, so the next time they kick me in the head, I can take it better, get back up again," he said.
Staffing issues and oversight
One of the organizations Lewis sought help from was the Community Health Center of Buffalo’s federally funded resiliency center. In 2023, the center was awarded $3,889,303 from the Department of Justice. This funding was for the resiliency center to provide a number of services to the immediate community near Tops Supermarket, victims’ families, survivors as identified by the FBI, and first responders.
These services included mental health counseling, case management and support referrals. The center also promised help around social needs like housing, transportation, food access, and rental and utility arrears.
Lewis began going to the center for mental health services and he said he was told he’d receive other assistance as well. But after attending a few workshops and game nights, and receiving one bus pass, things changed.
"They were supposed to gave me one the next month, no bus pass; they were supposed to buy me a furnace, no furnace," he said. "I got some potato chips and juice — and one bus pass."
Al Hammonds, the Community Health Center of Buffalo’s chief operating officer, described the staffing at the resiliency center as "fluid," with three to five people operating it on a daily basis. Some are new hires and others are pulled from existing roles within CHCB.
The fluidity in staffing has been especially notable in one area of the resiliency center: Leadership. The center has had three different directors. It currently has zero.
"It's a really tough job," Hammonds said. "It takes a diverse set of skills, and because this is a grant, it's kind of like a short-term need; it's not a forever thing. It's tough to find the right person, and then we would find people, but then it wasn't sustainable."
When it comes to Lewis' furnace and others feeling that promises were unfulfilled, Hammonds said the scope of the grant and government oversight forced the center to narrow its focus.
"We weren't often able to do that if they weren't specific victims or first responders or families of victims and first responders," he said. "So you probably do have people out there who feel like they should have received mental health services, or what have you, that didn't get them."
Survivors, community speaking out
The CHCB has run into a familiar tension in operating the resiliency center: How to reconcile who the community sees as impacted with who the funding rules define as eligible.
It’s a tension we explored in Part I with the Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund, overseen by the National Compassion Fund. Like the survivors fund, the resiliency center was created to serve people most directly impacted by the tragedy, and it operates within specific parameters for who can receive assistance.
Even those who are deemed eligible describe a process that is painful, time-consuming, and mentally draining.
Recently, a group of frustrated residents, witnesses and survivors of the mass shooting held a forum calling for accountability from the organizations they feel got the money, but aren’t delivering.
Ground Zero Speaks was organized by Dominique Calhoun this year, two days after the fourth anniversary of 5/14. She used to live on Laurel Street, minutes away from the Jefferson Avenue Tops. She’s since moved, but the trauma of that day followed her all the way to her new home in Atlanta.
So did the case itself. Attorneys for the gunman began showing up on the doorsteps of witnesses, asking them how they felt about him facing the death penalty.
"I found out from speaking to people who are directly impacted, you have people who were evicted immediately after this," Calhoun said. "How do you have people who were dodging bullets inside the grocery store who are evicted directly after this? That should never be."
Julie Harwell was at the forum, too. She’s a survivor whose story has reached national audiences. In the years since May 14, she has been asked again and again to share what happened to her — and how the attack continues to affect her and her children, specifically, her daughter, Londin, who was just eight years old at the time.
"I'm like the poster child," Harwell said. "My daughter was in there, like I didn't know if she was alive or not. The father of my child was there. He hid her in the freezer while I was running for my life. People don't know how hard it is. Every year, I don't hear from none of these people until this day comes."
Harwell was found eligible to receive compensation from the Buffalo 5/14 Survivors Fund as a witness who experienced psychological trauma, but those funds took nearly two years to reach her.
She also received help with a security deposit through the resiliency center. But none of the assistance was substantial or timely enough to help her get back on her feet, or provide some sense of normalcy and stability for her children.
Harwell continues to struggle not only financially, but mentally. She told me she sought mental health services through a number of funded organizations, but those services were impersonal.
What pains her the most, she said, is the impact that day had on Londin, and that her daughter hasn’t benefitted from the donations given in her name.
Promises to the next generation
Early promises from organizations and from donors included commitments to invest in the futures of children and young adults in the area.
An early Buffalo Business First report quoted developer Doug Jemal as pledging at least $100,000 for living expenses, funeral expenses, or "even helping to put your kids through college."
Fellow developer Greg Daniel was reported as making a pledge to match Jemal’s gift, though Daniel’s gift was specifically to help the families of the victims.
Numerous attempts to reach Jemal and Daniel for follow-up have not been answered.
"He survived almost 30 years of being a police officer in Buffalo. So to get killed at a grocery store on a second job as a security guard is ridiculous." — Misty Walker, classmate of Aaron Salter
There was also a scholarship established in the name of Lieutenant Aaron Salter, the Tops Supermarket bodyguard who was murdered while defending the lives of others.
An organization called Legacy 514 was formed to honor the retired police officer’s memory. It received a $100,000 donation from Paddock Chevrolet and a $500 contribution from Canisius University to a scholarship named for Lieutenant Salter. The Legacy 514 website, now only accessible through webpage archives, also had a link where people could make donations online.
In 2023, Legacy 514 made a $50,000 investment in the lives of 10 students one year after the mass shooting, awarding each student a $5,000 scholarship. The organization’s public activity appears to have slowed after 2023, though related scholarship fundraisers continued into the following year. Known events included the 514 5K and Half-Marathon, sponsored by the Lieutenant Aaron Salter Memorial Scholarship, as well as the Celebrity Gala and Golf Tournament, hosted by Hall of Fame defensive end and Buffalo Bills legend Bruce Smith.
Social media activity for the organization ended a year ago, when it announced the cancellation of the 2025 gala and tournament.
The address for Legacy 514 was listed as 34 Benwood Avenue, also the address of the Community Health Center of Buffalo. It’s unclear what affiliation, if any, the organization had or still has with the health center.
Seeking a seat at the table
From food access to mental health, emergency assistance, scholarships and community investment, so many public commitments were made in the name of recovery.
Mark Talley, whose mother Geraldine Talley was killed on May 14, is among those who feel there hasn’t been much action behind those words. Talley has been a vocal critic of the way that tragic day has been publicly reframed each year. In his words, Buffalo treats 5/14 like its favorite holiday.
But underneath that criticism is the deeper concern that some organizations and individuals have been elevated by the tragedy, while the people most affected are still waiting for meaningful change.
"They profited off the community's pain," he said.
The disillusionment Talley and others have expressed comes from a lack of transparency and accountability involving the distribution of funds. Some of the nonprofits that received major grants in response to 5/14 lost momentum and aren’t as publicly active as they were four years ago. Some announced they were ceasing operations altogether. Some faced challenges with their nonprofit status, raising questions about oversight and eligibility.
That doesn’t mean there was mass fraud or misappropriation of funds. Some organizations that were structurally and financially unstable to begin with might not have been sustainable, even with donations and grants. In Buffalo, there have been a few notable cases of organizations facing tax-exempt status issues tied to administrative filing errors.
But even if there was no ill intent, that doesn’t erase the larger issue community members are still looking for as they seek the help they were promised, the help they saw millions of dollars devoted to providing.
It's led those in the community, those who were most affected, to feel completely left out of the process.
Much of the early decision-making after 5/14 was shaped by steering committees, commissions and organizations created to manage different forms of relief.
For some of those efforts, like the CHCB’s resiliency center, leaders say community involvement helped structure where and how to invest resources to serve those most impacted.
There were listening sessions "with the victims, the victims' families, and the first responders," CHCB COO Al Hammonds said. "It was very restricted. It wasn't this wide open, Town Hall forum."
Hammonds said the decision to restrict access to the listening session came directly from the Department of Justice, which oversees the more than $3.8 million in funding for the center.
Some other organizations that emerged after 5/14 say they are trying to bring the community closer to the decision-making process, especially when it comes to long-term investment.
"We're not doing it in a vacuum," said Buffalo Together steering committee member Garnell Whitfield, Jr., the son of 5/14 victim Ruth Whitfield. "We are engaging with the community to determine what their priorities are, what their needs are, and then we will move forward based on that."
Whitfield said this has come in the form of community meetings, and the Buffalo Together website has a newsletter signup to stay informed.
The need to stay vigilant
As Ground Zero Speaks aims to gain momentum, Calhoun and others impacted by 5/14 are strategizing to put ownership and oversight back into the hands of the community.
"We need to understand what came in so that we won't go down this road again," she said. "We can point fingers, we can say this is not working, that is not working, but we need to try to get some framework so that we can know how we can build."
Some view the aftermath of the mass shooting as a hard lesson learned in staying vigilant, accounting for how streams of funding are disbursed and making sure every dollar gets into the right hands.
Calhoun said education can help with that.
"Knock on wood, pray to God we don't have anything that happens like this again," she said, "but they're going to garnish us and raise more money, they're going to use our stories, our face, our likeness, and they're going to get funds."
Residents around Jefferson Avenue and members of Buffalo’s Black community, more broadly, didn’t simply lose something on May 14, 2022. They were robbed. Robbed of 10 lives. Robbed of security. Robbed of normalcy. And now, some worry the urgency, attention and resources poured into Buffalo after the attack are slowly slipping further from the people they were meant to help.
These residents aren’t looking for a payout; they’re looking for people to deliver on their promises, and for a clear accounting of the money that did not go directly to victims’ families, survivors or the community.
So where do we go from here with what we have been able to learn?
To find out, we must look at how we got here in the first place, and by here, I mean pre-5/14 Black Buffalo.
We’ll take a look at past and present, and learn about what some community members are hoping to see for the future. But not everyone’s hoping. Some are taking action; through asking tough questions, through community mobilization, and even through the judicial system.
Part III will publish Wednesday, June 3.
