CHARLESTON, S.C. — Dylann Roof, who police say opened fire and killed nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic African American church here, was arrested Thursday, more than 13 hours after the chilling attack.
Roof, a 21-year-old high-school dropout from Eastover, S.C., was taken into custody in North Carolina not long after law enforcement officials identified him as the sole suspect in the Wednesday night massacre, the deadliest attack on a place of worship in the United States in 24 years.
The oldest victim was 87; the youngest was 26. They included a library manager, a track and field coach and a state senator, Clementa Pinckney, who also served as senior pastor at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the shooting occurred.
Federal law enforcement officials said Roof, who is white, declared his hatred for black people before opening fire, and the U.S. Justice Department has said it is investigating the attack as a hate crime.
Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said Roof was arrested during a traffic stop in Shelby, N.C., at around 11 a.m. Mullen said Roof “was cooperative with the officer who stopped him” in Shelby, about 250 miles by road northwest of Charleston.
“In America, you know, we don’t let bad people like this get away with these dastardly deeds,” Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. (D) said at a news briefing. The longtime mayor said Roof — “an awful person” — “is now in custody, where he will always remain.”
Roof waived extradition from North Carolina. After his arrest, he boarded a small plane bound for South Carolina, according to local television affiliates.
The attack began about an hour after the white assailant entered one of the nation’s oldest African American churches and observed the Wednesday-night gathering, authorities said. Six women and three men were killed and at least one other person was injured in the shooting at Emanuel AME, a black landmark in the the birthplace of the Confederacy.
“We believe this is a hate crime; that is how we are investigating it,” Mullen said.
Although he acknowledged that many facts are not yet known, the president also said that insufficient gun laws were partially to blame. “Once again innocent people were killed because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun,” he said.
“Now is the time for mourning and for healing,” the president added. “But let’s be clear: At some point we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”
It was the deadliest attack on a U.S. house of worship since 1991, when nine people were killed at the Wat Promkunaram temple near Phoenix. Johnathan Doody, tried three times for the execution-style murders at the Buddhist temple, was sentenced in 2014 to 249 years in prison.
Carl Chinn, who runs what is considered to be the most extensive database on violence at houses of worship, said Wednesday’s shooting was “certainly one of, if not the most, vicious attacks I’ve seen at a faith-based organization,” said
“Acts like this one have no place in our country and no place in a civil society,” Attorney General Loretta E. Lynch said Thursday as she vowed to bring the perpetrator to justice.
Agents were continuing to interview witnesses, including one woman who survived the slaughter. Roof allegedly released her, one law enforcement official said, so she could tell others what had happened.
According to federal law enforcement officials, the gunman made racist comments before he started shooting inside the church.
Roof sat in the back of the room for about an hour, these officials said, and some people at the church encouraged him to join the discussion. Before he began firing a semiautomatic handgun, Roof said something that the officials described as hateful racial epithets.
Officials said that the gunshots were fired at close range, rather than a random spray of gunfire across the room.
Roof’s apparent Facebook profile photo carries a possible indicator of his worldview: The picture shows him skulking in the woods, wearing a jacket with at least two conspicuous patches. The patches, as the Southern Poverty Law Center quickly noted, are the old flags of racist, white-minority regimes in southern Africa.
[In photo, suspected Charleston shooter wears flags of racist regimes]
Roof lived about 15 miles southeast of Columbia, the state capital, in Eastover, court records show. He was arrested twice earlier this year, once on a drug charge and later for trespassing, records show. Both arrests occurred near Columbia.
He was found guilty of trespassing, but the drug charge was still pending. He was fined $262.50, which he elected to pay off in installments.
“We woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken,” Gov. Nikki Haley said after Roof’s capture. “So we have some grieving to do. And we have some pain to go through. Parents are having to explain to their kids how they can go to church and feel safe, and that’s not something we ever thought we’d have to deal with.”
[Remembering the Charleston church shooting victims]Charleston County Coroner Rae H. Wooten identified the victims by name and age Thursday afternoon, though she did not immediately provide spellings or other personal information.
Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, was the church’s pastor and a South Carolina state senator. Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49, sang in the church choir, the Charleston newspaper reported.
Ethel Lance, 70, worked for 30 years at the church, a relative told the Post and Courier. Susie Jackson, 87, a longtime church member, was Lance’s cousin, the newspaper reported.
Cynthia Hurd, 54, was branch manager of the St. Andrews Regional Library, just a few miles from the church where she was killed. Tywanza Sanders, 26, was a 2014 graduate of Charleston’s Allen University.
Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, was a church pastor and high school track and field coach, according to the Post and Courier.
Myra Thompson, 59, was an active member of Delta Sigma Theta Sorority, according to the Greenville News. Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, who died at a hospital, was a retired pastor from another Charleston church, ABC News reported.
“Hate has once again been let loose in an American community,” Vice President Biden and his wife, Jill Biden, said in a statement. “And the senseless actions of a coward have once again cut short so many lives with so much promise.”
Biden, who had seen Pinckney last year at a prayer breakfast in Columbia, called the shooting an “act of pure evil and hatred.”
[Clementa Pinckney remembered for calls for justice]
Long before the victims’ identities were confirmed, Emanuel AME members, faith leaders and state politicians feared the worst about Pinckney. Indeed, soon after the attack, the pastor’s friends and colleagues began expressing their condolences on social media.
“My friend and brother in Christ Senator Clementa Pinckney was shot to death in the senseless tragedy that occurred in Emanuel AME Church in Charleston,” Larry Grooms, a state senator, wrote on Facebook. “My heart breaks for the loss of Sen. Pinckney, the other victims and for their families. Now is the time for prayer. Let us all unite our hearts in prayer and ask God for His Grace, Love and Mercy.”
Police have not provided many details about the circumstances of Roof’s arrest, but Mullen, the Charleston police chief, said the traffic stop began when a citizen reported something suspicious to law enforcement. That tip prompted police to stop the car in Shelby.
Mullen also said that it did not appear in the aftermath of Roof’s arrest that other people participated in the shooting. “We don’t have any reason to believe that anybody else was involved,” he said.
Roof remained in Shelby for nearly an hour after his arrest. Mullen declined to discuss many details of the investigation and would not answer a question about whether Roof admitted guilt in the shooting.
Police said the victims were gathered in the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, also known as “Mother Emanuel,” for a prayer meeting Wednesday when the shooting occurred. The congregation, established in 1816, is one of the oldest African American churches in the United States.
[For Charleston’s Emanuel AME church, shooting is another painful chapter in long history]
“This is the most unspeakable and heartbreaking tragedy in historic Emanuel AME church, the mother church of the AME churches,” said Riley, the mayor. “People in prayer Wednesday evening, a ritual coming together, praying and worshiping God. To have an awful person come in and shoot them is inexplicable. Obviously the most intolerable and unbelievable act possible.”
“The only reason someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” Riley continued. “The only reason. It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine.”
Police said the shooting occurred at about 9 p.m. at the historic church, which is located between Henrietta and Calhoun streets near Marion Square in downtown Charleston. Emergency dispatchers received a call at about 9:05 p.m., police said, and units were immediately dispatched to the church.
When officers arrived, they determined that eight people had been killed inside the church, Mullen said. A ninth person was taken to a nearby hospital, where that person died, the police chief said. Police initially said a total of two people had been taken to the hospital, but clarified later that there was only one.
At a nearby Embassy Suites hotel, which was serving as an informal headquarters for church members in the hours after the shooting, people began sobbing and screaming as they learned details about what had happened. “It was a heartbreaking scene I have never witnessed in my life before,” Riley said.
The Rev. Norvel Goff, a presiding elder for the African Methodist Episcopal Church who was interviewed near the scene, said the gunman “walked in, from my understanding, not so much as a participant, but as a brief observer who then stood up and then started shooting.”
“It’s a very tragic situation,” Goff said. “Stressful. Grieving.”
Mullen told reporters that the person stayed with the group in the church for about an hour before opening fire.
“This tragedy that we’re addressing right now is undescribable,” the police chief said at a news conference early Thursday morning. “No one in this community will ever forget this night.”
After the shooting, helicopters swarmed overhead and heavily armed police wearing bulletproof vests fanned out across the city to search for the gunman.
“This was a very chaotic scene when we arrived,” Mullen said. “We were tracking this individual with canines. We were making sure that he was not in the area to commit other crimes. As all this was going on, we received information that there might be a secondary explosive device in the scene.”
Taxi driver Sheila Seagers, 60, heard the news on the radio and parked her Lincoln Town Car blocks from the scene. She stayed for hours, lingering and chatting quietly with friends. She called her state of mind a “ball of confusion.”
“I keep thinking of that big, beautiful church,” she said.
“We don’t want trouble but we keeping getting trouble,” she added. “I hate to say it, but what’s next? I pray that when morning comes there will be peace.”
[The stubborn persistence of American hate crime]
Crisis chaplains rushed to the scene as people started circles to pray for the victims and their families.
“I had to come, couldn’t sit home and watch my community on television,” said 59-year-old Ken Battle, a retired member of the U.S. Air Force. “But I can’t make up my mind about what has happened here. Being here helps me make meaning out of it.”
Johnny Brooks, 54, a retired electric worker, came with his wife. “Our backyard! Our city,” he said. “I am at a loss for words.”
At a subsequent news conference, Riley called the shooter a “horrible scoundrel” and said: “This is an unfathomable and unspeakable act by somebody filled with hate and with a deranged mind.”
At a midday prayer service at Morris Brown AME Church on Thursday, the congregation burst into sustained applause when Rev. Goff, the presiding elder, said the suspect had been captured.
“Some of us haven’t been to bed yet,” Goff said. “But good folk can’t go to sleep when evil is trying to come in.”
Source: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/morning-mix/wp/2015/06/17/white-gunman-sought-in-shooting-at-historic-charleston-african-ame-church/