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A 65-year-old victim of the Buffalo massacre went to the store with her sister to get strawberries for shortcakes — and died when she couldn’t run as fast as her sibling, who hid in a freezer.

Another woman — the 86-year-old mom of the city’s former fire commissioner — had just left her elderly ailing husband at a nursing home and was stopping by the Tops Friendly Market to pick up groceries when she was killed.

The mother of a 32-year-old victim said she found out her daughter died from seeing video of her being shot on social media.

And the 77-year-old head of a local food pantry also was among the 10 people slain by alleged 18-year-old gunman Payton Gendron — who was just like the young men she would have taught, her family said.

“You don’t expect this when your mother goes grocery shopping,” said Pamela Pritchett, 55, whose mom, Pearl Young, 77, had worked as a substitute teacher and helped feed needy locals at the city’s Central Park neighborhood before she was killed.

Ruth Whitfield, the mom of former Buffalo Fire Commissioner Garnell Whitfield, was shopping at the Tops when she was allegedly gunned down by the young white supremacist, too. 

Garnell told The Post on Sunday that his father doesn’t know about Ruth’s death yet.

She was at the nursing home “every day taking care of my dad, shaving him, cutting his nails, cleaning his ears, cutting his hair, washing him, bathing him…making sure his room was decorated for holidays,” Garnell Whitfield said. “She dedicated her entire life to her family but specifically the last eight years to him. “Yesterday she was leaving the nursing home, stopped at the store around the corner when this happened,” he said, his voice breaking.

Pritchett said her mom “shopped [at the Tops] fairly often. 

“On a warm day like yesterday, she’d go grocery shopping and take the bus back home.”

Young was a substitute teacher up until she died, mostly in special education, Pritchett said.

“She taught young men like him,” the daughter said of the alleged shooter.

Pritchett spoke with her mother the day before the shooting.

“We were just talking about basic stuff. I was just telling her that I’m finally over COVID. I was recovering from COVID so I didn’t want to go over there until I was better,” Pritchett said. Jimmie Smith posted on Facebook with a broken heart emoji and a picture of Young, “YOU DID NOT DESERVE THIS!!!! 

“You were so sweet and beautiful on the inside and out!”:

Katherine Massey, another woman who went to the grocery store to shop, was also killed in the carnage. Her sister, Barbara Mapps, 64, told The Post on Sunday that she’s so angry that she wants to choke Gendron and hopes he leads a life of suffering behind bars.

“I got pissed today and called the coroner. … [The killer] shot them all in the face,” Mapps said. “We have to close [Katherine’s] coffin. … One of the nicest people in the world.

“I don’t want him dead,” she said of her sister’s killer. “Please Jesus, don’t let him die. Let him suffer.”

Once in prison, “He should be with every black, Jew, Spanish person on the [cell] block. He should have no white folks, just black, Jews, Spanish. Chocolate milk, chocolate milk, chocolate milk – every type of chocolate,” Mapps said.

Massey was the secretary of her block association and volunteered at schools, Mapps said, noting her sister was instrumental in getting trees planted on their block.

The retired worker from Blue Cross Blue Shield also wrote opinion pieces for The Challenger, a Buffalo newspaper, Mapps said.

Massey, 72, was also known as a local activist, including for civil rights, said former Erie County Legislator Betty Jean Grant to The Buffalo News.

When Mapps and her brother heard about the shooting, they quickly rushed to Tops and stayed there for about eight hours.

“I got there in 3 minutes, and it was all chaos,” she said, her voice shaking. “There was a body on the ground when we got there.”

Celestine Chaney was also fatally shot, her granddaughter confirmed in a Facebook post. The granddaughter, who goes by Kay Savyy on Facebook, said she lost her best friend.

“I am so heartbroken man my grandma was murdered basically for the color of her skin in 2022,” she wrote Saturday, adding, “that man didn’t have a care in the world while doing such. I could and would never forgive that man.” 

Chaney’s son Wayne Jones told the New York Times his mother was shopping with her sister when shots rang out.

Jones said Chaney’s sister was able to escape to the freezer, “but my mom cannot really walk like she used to.”

Another victim, Heyward Patterson, 68, was at Tops because he was a jitney driver where he’d pick up shoppers and drive them home, according to The Buffalo News. He was remembered as a man of the community who was active in his church, family and friends told The Buffalo News.

The mother of 32-year-old Roberta Drury, Dezzelyn McDuffie, told The Buffalo News she found out her daughter had died from seeing video of her being shot on social media.

“She was just coming out of Tops,” McDuffie told the paper.

Supermarket security guard Aaron Salter Jr., a 55-year-old former Buffalo cop, was shot dead exchanging gunfire with the shooter.

“Today is a shock,” his son Aaron Salter III told the Daily Beast. “I’m pretty sure he saved some lives today. He’s a hero.”

Also killed in the shooting were Margus Morrison, 52; Andre Mackneil, 53; and Geraldine Talley, 62. 

On Saturday afternoon, Gendron — who posted a white supremacist manifesto online — allegedly fatally shot 10 people and wounded three others at the supermarket. He drove from “hours away” from his home in predominantly white Conklin, NY, to the supermarket in a mostly black neighborhood, officials said.

Eleven of the victims were black, while two were white.

Gendron — who was “heavily armed” and wrote N-word painted on the barrel of one of his three weapons — once threatened to shoot his high-school classmates.

Gov. Kathy Hochul said Sunday at the True Bethel Baptist Church in Buffalo that it’s a “symbol of strength” that the rest of the world is watching how Buffalo endures the “unthinkable.”

She said more than once how angered she was by the shooting.

“This is a whole new dimension where you’ve attacked people because of the color of their skin, because you are a coward. And I want to silence those voices now,” Hochul said.

“And make sure that yes, people will talk about Buffalo, but I want them to talk about Buffalo as the last place this ever happened. We will let this end right here because we are going to rise up and all of our white brothers and sisters need to be standing up as well in churches all across this state, all across this nation, because an attack on one of us is an attack on all of us because we are all God’s people.”

She slammed social -media platforms for allowing “this hatred to ferment and spread like a virus.”

“It’s spreading around the world as we speak. And there’ll be others who witness what happened in my beloved community and say, oh, that’s how you do it,” Hochul said. “That’s the manifesto. That’s how you attack peaceful, God-loving people, you strike them on a busy Saturday afternoon in a place called Buffalo because that was a zip code of a large African-American population. It’s all in the manifesto.”