After a 14-hour manhunt, the 21-year-old man accused of killing nine members of a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina was taken into custody yesterday. Governor Nikki Haley is calling for the death penalty and, now, suspect Dylann Storm Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder.
He also apparently admitted to orchestrating the terrorist massacre.
According to CNN,”Roof has confessed to authorities to shooting and killing nine people this week at a historically black church in Charleston, South Carolina, two law enforcement officials said Friday. One of the officials said that Roof, who is white, told investigators that he wanted to start a race war.” However, a Charlestown Police Department spokesperson denies that, “We’ve never said he told us he was trying to start a race wa. I don’t know where that came from. Let me be very clear about that.”
Roof allegedly attended bible study at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church on Wednesday night. According to the New York Times, “[Witnesses] said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and [Kristen] Washington’s cousin Tywanza Sanders, 26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of violence.”
“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms. Washington recounted.
The gunman replied, “Yes. You are raping our women and taking over the country.”
Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of [church pastor Rev. Clementa C.] Pinckney, said she heard about what happened inside the church from a survivor, a close friend. Johnson told CNN her friend recounted the man coming into the church, asking for the minister.
“My cousin, being the nice, kind, welcoming person he is, he welcomed him to his congregation, welcomed him to the Bible study, and he sat there for an hour … At the conclusion of the Bible study, they just heard just a ringing of a loud noise, and it was just awful from what I heard,” Johnson said.
The gunman took aim at the oldest person present, Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told the man to point the gun at him instead, she said, but the man said, “It doesn’t matter. I’m going to shoot all of you.”
One person recounted that Roof told her “that she was going to live so that she can tell the story of what happened,” and Johnson relayed that Roof asked if the survivor was alive, “He said good, because we need a survivor because I’m going to kill myself.” Among the survivors was a three-year-old child who played dead.
The shooter fled, setting off a frantic search. Police released surveillance images of the suspect entering the church, and apparently it was Roof’s sister, Amber, who contacted authorities. She is due to be married this Sunday.
Roof was caught in Shelby, North Carolina, after a motorist, Deborah Dills, on Highway 74 noticed that he and his car matched the descriptions of the suspect. She told the Times, “I thought oh no, Debbie, you’re just paranoid, you’ve had this on your mind so strong. This is not happening here. What would he be doing here?” But, after calling her boss, who asked her to follow the car, she was able to confirm it was Roof’s vehicle and Shelby police arrested him.
Photographs show Roof wearing South African apartheid-era patches on his jacket and with Confederate flag license plates. A high school friend told the Daily Beast, “I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs. He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”
A more recent friend revealed to ABC News, “He was big into segregation and other stuff. He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
Roof will be represented by a public defender.
While flags are at half-mast at state buildings in South Carolina, the Confederate flag was still standing tall at the Confederate Monument in Columbia yesterday. The Atlantic’s Ta-Nehisi Coates had this suggestion: “Take down the flag. Take it down now. Put it in a museum. Inscribe beneath it the years 1861-2015. Move forward. Abandon this charlatanism. Drive out this cult of death and chains. Save your lovely souls. Move forward. Do it now.”
The victims are Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Hon. Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; and Myra Thompson, 59. They were “leaders, motivators, counselors and the people everyone could turn to for a heap of prayer, friends and relatives said.”
