Killer prayed, then opened fire
Alleged white supremacist arrested in massacre of nine at historic black church
For one hour, police said, Dylann Roof sat through a prayer meeting with the people he was about to kill.
It was late evening in Charleston, S.C., and the gathering had attracted a small group of regular worshippers at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Roof, a slight 21-year-old dressed in hiking boots and sporting a bowl cut, sat among Cynthia Hurd, 54, a longtime librarian whose death would prompt the immediate closure of all Charleston’s 16 public library branches.
Also in attendance were Susie Jackson, 87, and Ethel Lance, 70, two grandmothers who had been with the church for decades. And Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent business graduate from nearby Allen University.
The Wednesday night prayer meeting included Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a church pastor and South Carolina state senator. Within hours, his desk at the South Carolina State House would be draped with black cloth and a red rose.
Roof had entered the church and asked for Pinckney, and sat next to the pastor during the meeting. Parishioners encouraged the unknown young man to join in and, according to Charleston police chief Gregory Mullen, Roof even prayed with them.
It was only at meeting’s end, at about 9 p.m., that Roof pulled out an automatic pistol of unknown make and calibre, and fired point blank into the churchgoers.
By the standards of the all-too-common U.S. mass shooting, Roof was unusually deliberate. Very few wounded would leave the AME church that night, and the shooter would reload five times.
Most victims died at the scene, and the only witnesses who survived unscathed, reports said, were a five-year-old girl who played dead, and a woman Roof spared so that she could “tell the world what happened,” according to a witness account.
We woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken.... When hate happens, we come together, and that’s what we’ll do. So now we grieve. And then we’ll heal. — Gov. Nikki Haley
Victims tried to reason with the shooter as the massacre progressed, but to no avail.
“I have to do it,” he replied, according to an NBC interview by Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Pinckney. “You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
Nine people di e d, six women and three men. Three of the slain were senior citizens.
“She’s a Christian, hardworking; I could call my granny for anything. I don’t have anyone else like that,” Jon Quil Lance, a grandson of victim Ethel Lance, told Charleston’s The Post and Courier while standing outside Medical University Hospital.
At the time, Lance did not know his grandmother was among the dead.
While victims lay dying, the shooter left the scene in a black sedan with a front licence plate bearing the insignia of the Confederate States of America, the short-lived country which comprised the slaveholding “South” during the U.S. Civil War.
Charleston, as one of the former centres of the Confederacy, still flies a Confederate battle flag outside its state house. On Thursday, it remained one of the few flags in the city not flying at halfmast.
Social media images of Roof also showed him wearing a jacket adorned with the old flags of apartheid South Africa and Rhodesia, the white minority-ruled predecessor to Zimbabwe.
After an all-night manhunt, Roof was captured without incident in Shelby, N.C., 400 kilometres northeast of Charleston. Police had been barraged by tips in the hours after a surveillance camera image of Roof was released to the media. One tipster was a childhood friend who remembered Roof ’s clothing from a recent video game session they had held together.
Almost immediately, police announced they were treating the mass-murder as having been motivated by hate.
“In this case, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that it is a hate crime,” police chief Greg Mullen told reporters.
Arrested late Thursday morning in a routine traffic stop, Roof “was co-operative with the officer who stopped him,” according to authorities.
The site of the massacre is one of the oldest black churches in the U.S., with roots stretching well back to the era of slavery.
“Where you are is a very special place in Charleston, and it’s a very special place because this church and this site … has been tied to the history and life of African Americans since about the early 1800s,” Pinckney told a civil rights gathering at the church in 2013.
One of the church’s founders, a free black man named Denmark Vesey, was executed in the early 1800s for organizing a slave rebellion, and a church on the site was burned in retaliation. As U.S. President Barack Obama noted in a statement about the mass murder, “this is a church that was burned to the ground be-
There is ... no doubt in my mind that it is a hate crime
cause its worshippers worked to end slavery.”
“This is a sacred place in the history of Charleston and in the history of America,” he said.
The church reorganized after the Civil War, and would go on to host a 1905 talk by black leader Booker T. Washington. Martin Luther King Jr. made it a stop during the Civil Rights era.
The Charleston shooting is the deadliest attack on a U.S. place of worship in recent memory, although it fits among a recent string of suspected white supremacists attacking religious facilities.
During the past 10 years, six U.S. churches, temples and Jewish centres have been subject to targeted murders by lone gunmen. Most notably, in August 2012, a white supremacist army veteran murdered six people at a Sikh temple in Oak Creek, Wis.