BUFFALO, N.Y. — It’s been almost two years, and Rose Marie Wysocki knows she’s not the same person she once was.
“I don’t do things I used to,” she said. “I don’t go out and socialize like I used to.”
She was a produce manager at Tops on Jefferson Avenue when the shooting happened on May 14, 2022. She survived thanks to a coworker hiding her in a back conference room.
But it wasn’t until she saw the shooter’s mugshot, that the guilt started to creep in.
“He was in the store around Easter time,” Wysocki said of the shooter. “We had a slight conversation, and he said something about, I didn't look like I belonged there.
“What could I have done before? That's all I kept asking myself: what could I have done differently?”
Over the last two years, Wysocki has come to realize there was nothing more she could have done differently, but she believes there’s something others could have done.
“Everything was in his hands,” she said. “It was his choice, and those people that fed him this crap, they need to be responsible. … All they think about is their bottom lines, their pockets.”
A lawsuit filed in Erie County is seeking to hold social media platforms accountable for their influence on the Tops shooting.
On Monday, an Erie County judge allowed the lawsuit to proceed when the platforms sought to dismiss it. It seeks to hold social media platforms accountable for their algorithms rather than the content, arguing they are the reason the shooter was exposed to the radical ideas that inspired his actions that day.
But regardless of if it is successful, Wysocki said it can’t make her who she once was again.
“We've lost beautiful souls,” she said. “We've lost beautiful people, and that's never going to change.”
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