Family members of the Buffalo shooting suspect say they believe the pandemic and its enforced isolation took its toll on the shooter's mental health which ultimately led to last weekend's horrific actions.

Payton Gendron, 18, is accused of murdering 10 people in a 'racist hate crime' after firing a barrage of 50 shots at the supermarket in upstate New York. 

Gendron, of Conklin, New York, has since pleaded not guilty to first-degree murder.

He is now being held without bail and faces life in prison. 

Relatives say they think the teen snapped after his sense of paranoia increased coupled with the sheer isolation of the pandemic.  

'I have no idea how he could have gotten caught up in this.

I blame it on COVID,' said a cousin of Gendron's mother, Sandra Komoroff, 68, said to the .

'He was very paranoid about getting COVID, extremely paranoid, to the point that — his friends were saying — he would wear the hazmat suit [to school],' she said.

'And then he got COVID just a few weeks ago.

… He went to family functions with a respirator mask on. He totally wasn't going to get COVID — and then he got COVID.

Komoroff said the family were 'were vaxxed to the max.'

'I don't know if it was a bad case, I just know he caught it.,' she added noting that the teen 'bought into the fear of COVID.'

'That's the only way to say it.

When you're home all day on the Internet, you're missing out on human contact. There's a lot of emotions and a lot of body language you're not getting as when you see their face,' Komoroff explained to the Post.

Husband, 68-year-old Dave Komoroff, also suggested that Gendron may have developed 'lizard brain' which controls aggression.

'I can't say it's impossible, but maybe that would happen one out of so many millions of times.'

Police said they are investigating a 180-page manifesto that Gendron reportedly posted before going on his rampage, which included a plan to drive several counties away to carry out the shooting.

Gendron identified himself as a white supremacist in the document, explaining his fears that white people are being replaced by other races. 

A preliminary investigation found Gendron repeatedly visited websites espousing white supremacist ideologies and race-based conspiracy theories - and extensively researched the 2019 mosque shootings in Christchurch, New Zealand, and the man who killed dozens at a summer camp in Norway in 2011, an official said.

It wasn't immediately clear why Gendron had traveled about 200 miles to Buffalo and targeted this particular grocery store, but investigators believe Gendron had specifically researched the demographics of the population around the grocer and had been searching for communities with a high number of black residents. 

Police said Gendron, wearing military gear and livestreaming with a helmet camera, shot a total of 11 black people and two white people in Saturday's rampage before surrendering to authorities.

Screenshots purporting to be from the Twitch broadcast appear to show a racial epithet scrawled on the rifle used in the attack, as well as the number 14, a likely reference to a white supremacist slogan.

Officials said the rifle Gendron used in the attack was purchased legally but the magazines he used for ammunition were not allowed to be sold in New York.

The Komoroff cousins have denied knowing about Gendron's alleged racist leanings, but did say that the teenager was 'very smart'.

'I don't know where he went online — the dark Web, or wherever — but apparently he got into some nasty stuff.

He's smart enough to get into dangerous stuff online, which maybe the average person wouldn't know how to get into. I mean, I'm trying to figure it out myself,' Dave Komoroff said. 

It was also revealed  that Gendron was not on law enforcement's radar - despite having underwent a mental health evaluation last summer after he threatened to open fire at his high school.

Police were called to Gendron's high school in Conklin, New York, located near the Pennsylvania border, on June 8, 2021 after he made a threatening statement, authorities revealed during a press conference Sunday. 

'The state police responded.

They investigated. They interviewed the subject. And they felt at the time it was appropriate to have that individual brought in for a mental health evaluation,' Gramaglia explained.

Gramaglia said the threat was not racist and not directed at a specific person or place. 

However, an unnamed law enforcement source said Gendron, then-17, had threatened to shoot up Pennsylvania's Susquehanna High School around graduation. 

Gendron was released after spending a day-and-a-half in the hospital. Gramaglia said that after his discharge, Gendron had no further contact with law enforcement.

'Nobody called in,' the police commissioner said.

'Nobody called any complaints.'

The entire episode, Dave Komoroff says, raises concerning questions. 

'The parents are well-to-do.
Did they put him in some kind of therapy? Because when they get the civil lawsuit, that's what's going to come out. Someone's gonna ask, "What did you do last year after this incident?" They'll ask the parents, "What did you do? What did you do to help this kid?"

'The parents are both college-educated.

They're intelligent. They're engineers. They're not hill people. "Did you think he needed any help?"'

'I would think that this family checks all the boxes,' he said. 'I'm trying to figure out the dysfunction, and I just can't.
We were at his graduation. He's an 18-year-old kid. I said, "Congratulations." He said, "Thank you." I said, "What do you intend to do?" He said, "Be an engineer like my mom and dad."

'I just don't see how this happened, but apparently this has been germinating for a long time.'

'There should have been lightbulbs going off,' Sandra Komoroff said to the 'This kid should have been in some kind of empathy training that teaches these are human beings.'

But the couple also insist that the teenager and his family were for intents and purposes 'normal'. 

'It is a good family, a very good family. It's unconscionable to me what happened. They're very average people, God-fearing,' Sandra explained.

'I don't understand the racist thing, because my family is the farthest thing from racist. I've never heard a racist comment from him, from his parents. It's almost like he just snapped. Something in him broke. The whole family is in shock.'

Another couple who know the Grendon's have told how they were completely surprised that their son was the shooter.  

'When I first heard that this happened … I actually had a different picture in my mind of who the family was — some family living in a trailer park some place in the outskirts, the family with their AR-15s,' said Cathy and Jerry Kozlowsk.

'You try your best as a parent. Something went wrong,' Jerry, 74, said. 'Parents miss stuff. You try as a parent the best you can. I'm sure they did. I'm grasping what happened to this young man. Why? What possesses you to go out and buy a device that is going to do that to people?'

Wife, Cathy, also shared her concerns over the family's future. 

'Pam and Paul and the boys — I can't imagine what that family is going through right now.

'For Paul to face going back to work, for Pam to face going back to work, for the boys to face going to school, it's not going to happen, at least right away. Maybe they'll have to move somewhere else, because they're going to get nothing but hate.'