Relatives of Buffalo Shooter Blames COVID-19 Isolation for Massacre

Oh heck nah! Relatives of the Buffalo supermarket shooter are using COVID as a reason for the massacre. They told The Post on Monday that 18-year-old Payton Gendron likely snapped because he was paranoid and had been isolated due to the pandemic.

Like is it hard for people to believe everything isn’t a mental illness? Sometimes it’s just RACISM.

They also said that they had no clue that he was an alleged white supremacist but did say he clearly needed help after threatening his high school classmates more than a year ago.

They don’t know if he ever received help.

“I have no idea how he could have gotten caught up in this. I blame it on COVID,’’ said Sandra Komoroff, 68, who is a cousin of Gendron’s mom, Pamela, when referring to the teen’s alleged hate-fueled rampage that took the lives of 10 black people at a Tops Friendly Market on Saturday.

“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 added.

“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.”

“They were vaxxed to the max,” she added in regards to the family. “I don’t know if it was a bad case, I just know he caught it.”

Apparently, Gendron had “bought into the fear of COVID.”

“That’s the only way to say it. And when you’re home all day on the internet, you’re missing out on human contact,” Sandra said. “There’s a lot of emotions and a lot of body language you’re not getting [as] when you see their face.”

Her husband, Dave Komoroff, 68, also addressed the matter, saying, “In theory, [COVID] could have affected what they call the lizard brain — the part of the brain that controls aggression.

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

Before Saturday’s massacres, Gendron had allegedly written a 180-page white supremacist manifesto that rambled on about his racist philosophy and also outlined his step-by-step plans for the slaughter, law enforcement sources have said.

The chilling document also detailed how he’d become “radicalized” online because of “extreme boredom” amid the early days of the pandemic, the New York Post reported.

The Komoroffs denied knowing anything about Gendron’s horrific racist thinking, with Dave adding, “He’s 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 may be the average person wouldn’t know how to get into.

“I mean, I’m trying to figure it out myself.”

When asked about his threats at his school in June 2021 — when Gendron was asked about his future plans and said that he wanted to commit a slay-suicide — Dave responded, “My question is, and I don’t know the answer either, but did they do something?”

“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?’ ”

At the time, State Police took him to the hospital for a psych evaluation but he was released a day and a half later.

“There should have been lightbulbs going off,’’ Sandra said. “This kid should have been in some kind of empathy training that teaches these are human beings.”

Other than that, the teen and his family checked all the boxes of “what you would consider normal,” they added.

“It is a good family, a very good family. It’s unconscionable to me what happened. They’re very average people, God-fearing,” Sandra said.

“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.”