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| Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof is escorted from the Sheby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people Wednesday night at the historic The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. |
CHARLESTON, S.C.
(AP) -- A white man who joined a prayer meeting inside a historic
black church and then fatally shot nine people was captured without
resistance Thursday after an all-night manhunt, Charleston's police
chief said.
Dylann Storm Roof, 21, spent
nearly an hour inside the church Wednesday night before killing six
women and three men, including the pastor, Chief Greg Mullen said. A
citizen spotted his car in Shelby, North Carolina, nearly four hours
away.
The chief wouldn't discuss a motive.
Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. called it "pure, pure concentrated
evil." Stunned community leaders and politicians condemned the attack on
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Attorney General
Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department has begun a hate crime
investigation.
President Barack Obama, who personally knew the slain pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, said these shootings have to stop.
"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,"
Obama said.
Pinckney, 41, was a married father
of two who spent 19 years in the South Carolina legislature. He became
the youngest member of the House when he was first elected as a Democrat
at 23.
"He had a core not many of us have,"
said Sen. Vincent Sheheen, who sat beside Pinckney in the Senate. "I
think of the irony that the most gentle of the 46 of us - the best of
the 46 of us in this chamber - is the one who lost his life."
The
other victims were identified as Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26;
the Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70;
Susie Jackson, 87; the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; and DePayne Doctor,
49.
The shootings took out the heart of a
community - civic leaders including three pastors, a regional library
manager, a college enrollment counselor, and a high school track coach -
and left the historic church with just one living minister.
"Immediately,
my heart started to sink, because I knew that this was going to mean a
forever impact on many, many people," Charleston County Coroner Rae
Wooten said.
Wooten said autopsies would be
conducted over the next several days and did not have specific
information on how many times the victims were shot or the locations of
their injuries.
Roof waived extradition from
North Carolina Thursday and was taken to a waiting police car wearing a
bulletproof vest, with shackles on his feet and his hands cuffed behind
his back. Roof also waived his right to counsel, meaning he will either
represent himself or hire his own lawyer.
Roof's
childhood friend, Joseph Meek Jr., alerted the FBI after recognizing
him in a surveillance camera image. They recognized the stained
sweatshirt he had been wearing while playing Xbox videogames in their
home.
"I don't know what was going through his
head," said Meek's mother, Kimberly Konzny. "He was a really sweet kid.
He was quiet. He only had a few friends."
But
Roof had been to jail: court records show a pending felony drug case
and a past misdemeanor trespassing charge. And he proudly 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
Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe, and apartheid-era South
Africa.
Meek said they had been best friends in middle school, then lost touch for years until Roof reappeared a few weeks ago.
"All
the sudden out of the blue, he started talking about race. He started
talking about Trayvon Martin," Meek told The Associated Press Thursday
after he was questioned by authorities.
"He
said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something
about it for the white race. He said he wanted segregation between
whites and blacks. I said, `that's not the way it should be.' But he
kept talking about it."
Roof wasn't known to
the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and it's not
clear whether he 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.
Charleston
authorities put out photos of the suspect from the church's surveillance
camera early Thursday. Later that morning, authorities west of
Charlotte, North Carolina, got a report of a sighting of the suspect's
car headed west, said Jeff Ledford, the police chief in Shelby, North
Carolina. Officers pulled over the driver and arrested Roof just before
11 a.m., about 14 hours after the attack.
A gun was found in the car, Mullen said.
The
shooting evoked painful memories of other attacks. Black churches were
bombed in the 1960s when they served as organizing hubs for the Civil
Rights movement, and burned by arsons across the South in the 1990s.
Others survived shooting sprees.
This
particular congregation, which formed in 1816, has its own grim history:
A 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.
This
shooting "should be a warning to us all that we do have a problem in
our society," said state Rep. Wendell Gilliard, a Democrat whose
district includes the church. "There's a race problem in our country.
There's a gun problem in our country. We need to act on them quickly."
"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," Riley
said.
"We are going to put our arms around that church and that church
family."
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."
A few bouquets of flowers tied to a police barricade outside the church formed a small but growing memorial.
"Today
I feel like it's 9-11 again," Bob Dyer, who works in the area, said
after leaving an arrangement of yellow flowers wrapped in plastic. "I'm
in shock."
The attack came two months after
the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by a white
police officer in neighboring North Charleston, which increased racial
tensions. The officer awaits trial for murder, and the shooting prompted
South Carolina to pass a law, co-sponsored by Pinckney, to equip police
statewide with body cameras.
