Gunman caught in killing of 9 in historic black church
CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — It was an act of “pure, pure concentrated evil,” Charleston’s mayor said — a black community’s leading lights extinguished by gunfire, allegedly at the hands of a young white man who sat among them through an hour of prayer.
In one blow, the gunman added nine victims at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church to the ever-lengthening list of America’s racial casualties, and ripped out part of South Carolina’s civic heart. They included a state senator who doubled as the church’s minister, three other pastors, a regional library manager, a high school coach and speech therapist, a government administrator, a college enrollment counselor and a recent college graduate — six women and three men who felt called to open their church to all.
Police arrested Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old who had complained that “blacks were taking over the world” and that “someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” according to a friend who alerted the FBI.
Roof waived extradition and was put on a plane from North Carolina on Thursday afternoon, authorities said. He was being held at a detention center pending a bond hearing, Charleston Police tweeted Thursday evening.
President Barack Obama called the tragedy yet another example of damage wreaked on America by guns. NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said “there is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people.” Others bemoaned the loss to a church that has served as a bastion of black power for 200 years, despite efforts by white supremacists to wipe it out.
“Of all cities, in Charleston, to have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained,” said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. “We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family.”
Surveillance video showed the gunman entering the church Wednesday night, and Charleston County Coroner Rae Wilson said the gunman initially didn’t appear threatening.
“The suspect entered the group and was accepted by them, as they believed that he wanted to join them in this Bible study,” she said. Then, “he became very aggressive and violent.”
Roof’s childhood friend, Joey Meek, called the FBI after recognizing him in the surveillance footage, down to the stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox videogames in Meek’s home the morning of the attack.
“I didn’t THINK it was him. I KNEW it was him,” Meek told The Associated Press after being interviewed by investigators.
Roof was arrested without incident Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina, after a motorist spotted him and tipped police.
His previous record includes misdemeanor drug and trespassing charges. He wasn’t known to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and it’s not clear whether Roof had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina, but he appears to be a “disaffected white supremacist,” based on his Facebook page, said the center’s president, Richard Cohen.
Meek said he and Roof had been best friends in middle school, where “he was just a quiet kid who flew under the radar.” Roof then disappeared and showed up again several weeks ago, seeming even more quiet and withdrawn.
But on his Facebook page, Roof displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes, posing with a Confederate flags plate on his car and wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe.
And when Meek asked what was troubling Roof, “he started talking about race,” the friend said.
Spilling blood inside “Mother Emanuel,” founded in 1816, evoked painful memories nationwide, a reminder that black churches so often have been the targets of racist violence.
A church founder, Denmark Vesey, was hanged after trying to organize a slave revolt in 1822, and white landowners burned the church in revenge, leaving parishioners to worship underground until after the Civil War. The congregation rebuilt the church and grew stronger. Martin Luther King Jr., brought the 1960s campaign for voting rights to its pulpit.
Its lead pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney — among the dead — recalled his church’s history in a 2013 sermon, saying “we don’t see ourselves as just a place where we come to worship, but as a beacon and as a bearer of the culture.”