U.S.
Brendan Smialowski / AFP / Getty Images
A white man who joined a prayer meeting inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina and then allegedly fatally shot nine people — in what the city's mayor called an act of “pure, pure evil” — was captured without resistance Thursday after an all-night manhunt.
In one blow, the alleged gunman, Dylann Roof, 21, ripped out part of South Carolina's civic heart: 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 and, authorities said, welcomed the gunman into their Bible study.
The mass shooting set off an intense 14-hour manhunt that ended when Roof was arrested at a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina, about 220 miles north of Charleston. A florist running late from work reportedly tipped off the local police.
Wednesday's mass shooting at the almost 200-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church comes after a year of turmoil and protests over race relations, policing and criminal justice in the United States. A series of police killings of unarmed black men has sparked a renewed civil rights movement under the ‘Black Lives Matter' banner.
“The fact that this took place in a black church obviously raises questions about a dark part of our history,” said President Barack Obama. “Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”
Federal authorities said they would investigate the shooting as a hate crime. The U.S. Department of Justice said the investigation — which involves the department's civil rights division, the FBI and the U.S. Attorney's Office in South Carolina — will be “parallel to and cooperative with the state's investigation.”
Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen, who said he believes the incident was a hate crime, told reporters at a morning news conference that the entire city of Charleston was grieving.
“This tragedy that we’re addressing right now is indescribable,” Mullen said before Roof's arrest. “It is unfathomable that somebody in today’s society would walk into a church when people are having a prayer meeting and take their lives,” he added.
Roof sat with churchgoers for about an hour on Wednesday before opening fire, Mullen said. Among those killed was the church's current pastor, a state Sen. Clementa Pinckney.
Roof reloaded five times, even as victims pleaded with him to stop, according to a relative of Pinckney's.
Carson Cowles, Roof's uncle, told law enforcement officials on Thursday that he recognized Roof in a photo released by police and noted that Roof's father gave him a .45-caliber pistol for his birthday this year.
Images on social media on Thursday showed Roof displaying symbols commonly associated with racist and white-dominant governing systems. In one photo from his Facebook account, Roof is wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), governments that enforced systems of racial separation and white privilege.
In another picture, shared by the Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabama-based civil rights group, Roof is sitting on the hood of a car with a plate commemorating the Confederate States of America.
Dalton Tyler, Root’s roommate who spoke with ABC News, said that the shooter had been “planning something like that for six months.”
“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
Abraham Belanger, the pastor of the First Fruits Community Church in nearby Summerville, told Al Jazeera: "Mother Emanuel Church is such an influential church, and Sen. Pinckney — the loss of that senator is just a great loss to the community, along with all of the others that we lost as well."
In addition to the nine fatalities, one person was wounded in the attack and taken to a hospital, police said. Three others who were present at the time of the shooting survived.
Condemnation of the attack came swiftly. Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley on Wednesday condemned the shooting and characterized it as a hate crime. "The only reason why someone would walk into a church and shoot people who are praying is out of hate," he said.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley urged people to pray for the victims and their families. “While we do not yet know all of the details, we do know that we'll never understand what motivates anyone to enter one of our places of worship and take the life of another,” she said in a statement on Facebook.
Cornell William Brooks, the president and CEO of the NAACP, released a statement expressing outrage over the incident and extended his sympathies to the victims' families. "The NAACP was founded to fight against racial hatred, and we are outraged that 106 years later, we are faced today with another mass hate crime. Our heartfelt prayers and soul-deep condolences go out to the families and community of the victims at Charleston’s historic Emanuel AME Church,” he said. “There is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of Scripture.”
Mother Emanuel, the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, opened its doors in 1816. Six years later, the church building was burned to the ground when one of the church’s founders was implicated in a slave revolt plot. It was rebuilt in 1834.
“I've had to make statements like this too many times," a weary President Obamasaid at a news conference, in which he again called on the country to take up with renewed vigor attempts to lessen the scourge of gun violence and mass shootings.
“Now is the time for mourning and for healing, 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 doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency,” he said.
Al Jazeera and wire services
The tragic shooting in Charleston resonates with the history of black spiritual empowerment
Bill in state legislature would increase penalties for crimes motivated by bias; three similar efforts did not pass
The victims, ages 26 to 87, included a state senator, a recent graduate and a track team coach
Photos show Dylann Roof wearing flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia
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