Charleston church shooting

"2015 Charleston shooting" redirects here. For the shooting by a North Charleston police officer, see Shooting of Walter Scott.

Charleston church shooting
The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2008
Charleston church shooting (South Carolina)
Location	Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, United States
Coordinates	32°47′14″N 79°55′59″W
Date	June 17, 2015 (2015-06-17) c. 9:05 p.m. (EDT)
Target	African American Christian churchgoers
Attack type	Mass shooting, mass murder, hate crime, terrorism (possible)
Weapons	Glock 41 .45-caliber handgun
Deaths	9
Injured	1
Perpetrators	Dylann Roof
Motive	Racism

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina, United States. The church is one of the United States' oldest black churches and has long been a site for community organizing around civil rights. Nine people were killed, including the senior pastor the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator. A tenth victim was also shot, but survived.

In the immediate aftermath, police sought a white male later identified as Dylann Roof, who was captured the morning after the attack in Shelby, North Carolina. The United States Department of Justice is investigating the possibility that the shooting was either a hate crime or an act of domestic terrorism. The Federal Bureau of Investigation considers it a hate crime, but not an act of terrorism. Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder by the State of South Carolina.

Background

The 208-year-old church has played an important role in the history of South Carolina, including the slavery era, the 1960s Civil Rights Movement, and the Black Lives Matter movement in the 2010s. The church was founded in 1816 and it is the oldest African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, often referred to as "Mother Emanuel". It is the oldest historically black congregation south of Baltimore. When one of the church's co-founders, Denmark Vesey, was suspected of planning a slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, 35 people, including Vesey, were executed and the church was burned down. Charleston citizens accepted that a slave rebellion was to begin at the stroke of midnight on June 16, 1822, and to erupt the following day; the shooting occurred on the 193rd anniversary of the thwarted uprising. The rebuilt church was formally shuttered with other all-black congregations by the city in 1834, meeting in secret until 1865 when it was formally reorganized, acquired the name Emanuel ("God with us"), and rebuilt upon a design by Denmark Vesey's son. That structure was badly damaged in the 1886 Charleston earthquake. The current building dates from 1891.

The senior pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, had held rallies after the shooting of Walter Scott by a white police officer on April 4, 2015, in nearby North Charleston, and as a state senator, he pushed for legislation requiring police to wear body cameras. Several similarities were noted between the massacre at Emanuel A.M.E. and the 1963 bombing of a politically active African-American church in Birmingham, Alabama where the Ku Klux Klan (KKK) killed four black girls and injured fourteen others, an attack that galvanized the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

A number of scholars, journalists, activists, and politicians have emphasized the need to understand the attack in the broader context of racism in the United States, rather than seeing it as an isolated event of racially motivated violence. Attacks on black churches were a common occurrence throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. In the late 1860s, following the American Civil War, racial terrorism by white supremacists in the South was ubiquitous during the Reconstruction Era, and the KKK became an organized terrorist organization. In 1870 a federal grand jury determined that the Klan was a "terrorist organization", and the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act was used by Ulysses S. Grant to dismantle the KKK. In 1996 Congress passed a law making it a federal crime to damage religious property because of its "racial or ethnic character" in response to a spate of 154 suspicious church burnings since 1991, and a black church in Massachusetts was burned down after the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.

Shooting

At around 9:05 p.m. EDT on June 17, 2015, the Charleston Police Department responded to calls of a shooting at Emanuel A.M.E. Church. A man described as white, with sandy-blond hair, around 21 years old and 5 feet 9 inches (175 cm) in height, wearing a gray sweatshirt and jeans, opened fire with a .45-caliber handgun on a group of people inside the church at a Bible study attended by Pinckney. The shooter then fled. The shooting was the largest mass murder at an American place of worship, alongside a 1991 mass shooting at a Buddhist temple in Waddell, Arizona.

For nearly an hour prior to the attack, the shooter had been present and participating in the Bible study. A total of thirteen people attended the Bible study, including the shooter. According to the accounts of people who talked to survivors, the shooter asked for Pinckney and sat down next to him, initially listening to others during the study. He started to disagree when they began discussing Scripture. Eventually he stood up and pulled a gun from a fanny pack, aiming it at 87-year-old Susie Jackson. Jackson's nephew, 26-year-old Tywanza Sanders, tried to talk him down and asked him why he was attacking churchgoers. The shooter responded, "I have to do it. You rape our women and you're taking over our country. And you have to go." When he expressed his intention to shoot everyone, Sanders dove in front of Jackson and was shot first. The suspect then shot the other victims, all the while shouting racial epithets. He also reportedly said, "Y'all want something to pray about? I'll give you something to pray about." He reloaded his gun five times. Sanders' mother and his five-year-old niece, both attending the study, survived the shooting by pretending to be dead. Dot Scott, president of the local branch of the NAACP, said she had heard from victims' relatives that the shooter spared one woman (Sanders' mother) so she could, according to him, tell other people what happened. Before leaving the church, he reportedly "uttered a racially inflammatory statement" over the victims' bodies.

Several hours later, a bomb threat was called into the Courtyard by Marriott hotel on Calhoun Street, complicating the investigation and prompting an evacuation of the immediate area.

Victims

The victims, six women and three men, were all African American. Eight died at the scene; the ninth, Daniel Simmons, died in the hospital. They were all killed by multiple gunshots fired at close range. One other unidentified person was wounded, but survived. Five individuals survived the shooting unharmed, including Felicia Sanders, mother of slain victim Tywanza Sanders, and her granddaughter, along with Polly Sheppard, a Bible study member. Pinckney's wife and daughter were also inside the building during the shooting. The fatalities were identified as:

• Cynthia Marie Graham Hurd (54) – Bible study member and manager for the Charleston County Public Library system, who is the sister of Malcolm Graham
• Susie Jackson (87) – a Bible study and church choir member
• Ethel Lee Lance (70) – the church sexton and a former employee at the Gaillard Auditorium
• Depayne Middleton-Doctor (49) – a Bible study teacher employed as a school administrator and admissions coordinator at Southern Wesleyan University
• Clementa C. Pinckney (41) – the church pastor and a South Carolina state senator
• Tywanza Sanders (26) – a Bible study member and 2014 graduate of Allen University who was the nephew of Susie Jackson
• Daniel Simmons (74) – a reverend at the church who also served at Greater Zion A.M.E. Church in Awendaw
• Sharonda Coleman-Singleton (45) – a reverend at the church who was also a speech therapist and track coach at Goose Creek High School
• Myra Thompson (59) – a Bible study teacher and retired high school counselor

Suspect

Dylann Storm Roof
Mugshot of Roof taken by the Charleston County Sheriff's Office, June 18, 2015
Born	(1994-04-03) April 3, 1994 Columbia, South Carolina, United States
Known for	Suspect of 2015 Charleston church shooting

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) was named by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) as the suspected killer after his father and uncle contacted police to positively identify him upon seeing security photos of him in the news. Alternatively, it has been reported that his older half-sister also reported him to the police after seeing his photo on the news. He was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and was living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the attack. Roof was unemployed. His father Franklin Bennett and stepmother Paige Mann were divorced after ten years of marriage, in which Bennett was allegedly verbally and physically abusive towards Mann. Prior to the attack, Roof was living alternately in Bennett's and Mann's homes.

One image from his Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two nations noted for their white supremacist and racial segregation policies, apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia. Another online photo showed Roof sitting on the hood of his parents' car with an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it. According to his roommate, Roof expressed his support of racial segregation in the United States and had intended to start a civil war. According to a childhood friend, Roof went on a rant about the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the 2015 Baltimore protests that were sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody. He also often claimed that "blacks were taking over the world". Roof reportedly told friends and neighbors of his plans to kill people, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously. A former high school classmate said, despite Roof's racist comments, some of his friends were black. An African-American friend of his said that he never witnessed Roof expressing any racial prejudice, but also said that a week before the shooting, Roof had confided in him that he would commit a shooting at the college.

Roof attended several schools in two counties, including White Knoll High School in Lexington, in which he repeated the ninth grade, finishing it in another school. After that point, he apparently stopped attending classes, and according to his family, he dropped out of school and spent his time alternating between playing video games and doing drugs.

He had a prior police record consisting of two arrests, both made in the months preceding the attack. On March 2, 2015, he was questioned about a February 28 incident at the Columbiana Centre in Columbia, in which he entered the mall wearing all-black clothing and asked employees unsettling questions. During the questioning, they found a bottle of what was later admitted to be Suboxone, a narcotic used to treat opiate addictions, and Roof was arrested for drug possession. He was subsequently banned from the Columbiana Centre for a year, but after he was arrested again on April 26 for trespassing on the mall grounds, the ban was extended for three additional years.

Roof's uncle, Carson Cowles, said that he expressed worry about the introversion of his then-nineteen-year-old nephew, because "he still didn't have a job, a driver's license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time." Cowles said he tried to mentor Roof, but was rejected and they drifted apart.

Cowles said that Roof got a .45-caliber pistol from his father for his twenty-first birthday in April. Other reporters said he purchased the gun himself, using money given to him on his birthday. According to the FBI who conducted a trace on the firearm recovered from the suspect, it was determined that the suspect purchased a Glock 41 from a retail gun store in Charleston. One week prior to the shooting, two of his friends tried to hide the gun after Roof claimed he was going to kill people, but returned it to him after the girlfriend of one of the friends, whose trailer they hid the gun in, pointed out he was on probation and needed to have the gun out of his possession.

An unidentified source said interrogations with Roof after his arrest determined he had been planning the attack for around six months, researched Emanuel A.M.E. Church, and targeted it because of its role in African-American history. One of the friends who briefly hid Roof's gun away from him said, "I don't think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school. But I think he couldn't get into the school because of the security ... so I think he just settled for the church."

Website and racist manifesto

On June 20, a website that had been registered to a "Dylann Roof" on February 9, 2015, The Last Rhodesian (www.lastrhodesian.com), was discovered. Though the identity of the domain's owner was intentionally masked the day after it was registered, law enforcement officials confirmed Roof as the owner. The site included a cache of photos of Roof posing with a handgun and a Confederate Battle Flag, as well as with the widely-recognized nazi code numbers 88 (an abbreviation for the salute "Heil Hitler!") and 1488, written in sand. Roof was also seen spitting on and burning an American flag. While some photographs seemed to show Roof at home in his room, others were taken on an apparent tour of South Carolina historical sites, including Sullivan's Island, the largest slave disembarkation port in North America, and at the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville. The website also contained an unsigned 2,444-word manifesto with Roof's racist views:

I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites [sic] in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.

In that manifesto Roof traces the origins of his views to the Trayvon Martin case. This led Roof to visit the website of the Council of Conservative Citizens, a white nationalist group, where he saw coverage of black-on-white murders. The Council of Conservative Citizens took down its website in the immediate wake of publicity.

According to domain logs, the website was last modified at 4:44 p.m. on the day of the shooting, with Roof noting, "[A]t the time of writing I am in a great hurry."

After the shooting

Manhunt and capture

The attack was treated as a hate crime by police, and officials from the FBI were called in to assist in the investigation and manhunt.

At 10:44 a.m., on the morning after the attack, Roof was captured in a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina, approximately 245 miles (394 km) from the shooting scene. A .45-caliber pistol was found in the car during the arrest, though it was not immediately clear if it was the same one used in the attack. Police received a tip-off from a citizen from Gastonia, North Carolina. She recognized Roof driving his car, a black Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina license plates and a three-flag "Confederate States of America" bumper decoration, on U.S. Route 74, recalling security camera images taken at the church and distributed to the media. She later recalled, "I got closer and saw that haircut. I was nervous. I had the worst feeling. Is that him or not him?" She called her employer, who contacted local police, and then tailed the suspect's car for 35 miles (56 km) until she was certain authorities were moving in for an arrest.

Legal proceedings

A prayer vigil at Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church

Roof waived his extradition rights and was flown back to South Carolina on the evening of June 18 to be held at the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in North Charleston. At the jail, his cell-block neighbor was, coincidentally, Michael Slager, the former North Charleston officer charged with first-degree murder in the wake of his shooting of Walter Scott. He confessed to committing the attack with the intention of starting a race war, and reportedly told investigators he "almost" didn't go through with his "mission" because members of the church study group had been so nice to him.

On June 19, he was charged with "nine counts of murder and one count of possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime." He first appeared in court via video link at a bond hearing later that day, where shooting survivors and relatives of five of the victims spoke to him directly, forgave him, and said they were "praying for his soul". Governor Nikki Haley has called for prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Roof. Roof is scheduled to reappear in court in October 2015.

Aftermath

Heidi Beirich, the director of the Intelligence Project for the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC) in Montgomery, which tracks the activity of American hate groups, said the gunman's reported comments reflected a major topic on white supremacist Internet forums, which are preoccupied with the idea that whites are being hugely victimized by blacks and no one is paying attention. The specter of white women being sexually assaulted by black men has a long history as well, she said: "It's probably the oldest racist trope we have in the U.S." At this point in the investigation, it is unclear whether the suspect had any connection to hate groups, although Beirich says such groups have been growing over the past decade, and "for several years South Carolina has been the place with the highest density of hate groups."

At Morris Brown African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, numerous people of different races and religions attended a ceremony commemorating the victims and proclaimed that the attack would not divide the community. Another such ceremony occurred at the TD Arena in the College of Charleston. On June 21, four days after the shooting, Emanuel A.M.E. Church is scheduled to reopen for its Sunday worship service.

On June 18, the day after the shooting, many flags, including those at the South Carolina State House, were flown at half-mast. The Confederate Battle Flag flying over the Confederate Soldier Monument near the State House was not, as South Carolina law prohibits alteration of the flag without the consent of two-thirds of the state legislature. Also, the flag lacks a pulley system, meaning it cannot be flown at half-mast, only removed. Calls to remove the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds, as well as debates over the context of its symbolic nature, were renewed after the attack by several prominent figures, including President Barack Obama, Mitt Romney, Jeb Bush, and others. On June 20, several thousand people gathered in front of the South Carolina State House in protest. An online petition at MoveOn.org encouraging the removal of the flag has so far accrued over 380,000 signatures.

Reactions

Officials

Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley, Jr. denounced the attack and said, "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. We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family."

South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said, "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. Please join us in lifting up the victims and their families with our love and prayers."

President Barack Obama said in Charleston on June 18, "Once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun...We as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries." At a Washington press conference later that day, he said, "Michelle and I know several members of Emanuel AME Church. We knew their pastor, Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who, along with eight others, gathered in prayer and fellowship and was murdered last night. And to say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families, and their community, doesn’t say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel."

FBI Director James Comey said the FBI would not investigate the shooting as terrorism, but as a hate crime, for its lack of an apparent political motive.

Families

After Roof's appearance at his bond hearing, his family issued a statement, expressing their shock and grief at his actions. During the bond hearing, several family members of the victims told Roof that they forgave him.

Church

The World Methodist Council, of which the AME Church is a part, said it "urges prayer and support for the victims’ families and those members of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who have been so gravely affected by this crime motivated by hate." The President and Vice-President of the British Methodist Conference, which is also a member of the World Methodist Council, have sent a letter of solidarity to the African Methodist Episcopal Church, saying, "The hearts of the members of the Methodist Church in Great Britain go out to the families and friends of those killed; to the Church; and to the wider communities in Charleston". The Council of Bishops of The United Methodist Church, which is also a member of the World Methodist Council and is in full communion with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, called on its members "to support the victims of this and all acts of violence, to work to end racism and hatred, to seek peace with justice, and to live the prayer that our Lord gave us, that God's 'kingdom come, (and) will be done, on earth as it is in heaven'." The Christian Methodist Episcopal Church, also a member of the World Methodist Council and in full communion with the African Methodist Episcopal Church, shared its support with the latter Church, with the presiding bishop stating, "let us join with the AMEs in prayer for the healing of the families touched by this tragedy – the families of the victims and the family of the perpetrator."

Candidates for president

At least eighteen prospective candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential election expressed reactions through various media and addresses.

Jeb Bush, speaking at the Faith and Freedom Coalition Conference in Washington on June 19, said that "I don't know what was on the mind or the heart of the man who committed these atrocious crimes", and called the shooting an "evil act of aggression". When asked by a reporter for the Huffington Post if the shooting was racially motivated, Bush said, "I don't know. Looks like to me it was, but we'll find out all the information. It's clear it was an act of raw hatred, for sure. Nine people lost their lives, and they were African American. You can judge what it is." That evening, Bush referred to Roof as "a racist".

Carly Fiorina said, "We ought not to start immediately rushing to policy prescriptions or engaging in the blame game."

Ben Carson said, "If we don't pay close attention to the hatred and the division that's going on in our nation, this is just a harbinger of what we can expect."

Hillary Clinton, speaking at the U.S. Conference of Mayors in San Francisco, said that although it is "tempting" to isolate the shooting as a random event, "America's long struggle with race is far from finished", and argued that "race remains a deep fault line in America and millions of people of color still experience racism in their everyday lives." Clinton called for "common-sense" gun reforms, and a national acknowledgement with what she described as a persistent problem of "institutional racism."

Chris Christie said, "It's depraved, it's unthinkable. We can't put our minds around conduct like that, can we?"

Ted Cruz said, "[t]oday the body of Christ is in mourning. Christians across the nation, across the world, believers across the world, are lifting up the congregants at Emmanuel AME."

Lindsey Graham, who has served as the senior United States Senator from South Carolina since 2003, said in response to a question at CNN, "[r]eally, the last thing on my mind right now is a political debate. My job is to be here, and to show solidarity with my community and my state [...] I own a bunch of guns, and I haven't hurt anybody, but there is something wrong with the background system." Graham later amended his comments, calling Roof "a racial jihadist", saying that the only reason the victims where killed was their race. Graham initially assessed the incident by saying that "I just think he was one of these whacked-out kids. I don’t think it’s anything broader than that".

Martin O'Malley described himself as "pissed" in an email to supporters after the shooting, which he called an "unspeakable tragedy". "It's time we called this what it is: a national crisis," O'Malley added, calling for increased gun control measures and condemning the response from the National Rifle Association.

Rand Paul said, "[w]hat kind of person goes into a church and shoots nine people? There's a sickness in our country, but it's not going to be solved by our government."

Rick Perry said initially that the shooting was a "drug induced" accident, and later said that didn't know if it was "act of terror", but acknowledged that it was "a crime of hate".

Marco Rubio did not publicly comment on the events, but tweeted support for the victims.

Bernie Sanders described the shooting as an "an act of terror”, and in an email to supporters he wrote that "This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism."

Rick Santorum called it an "obviously a hate crime", and that it was an assault "on religious liberty".

Donald Trump tweeted that the mass shooting was "incomprehensible."

Others

The morning after the attack, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy questioned whether the shooting might have been motivated by anti-Christian sentiment, saying, "It was released earlier and extraordinarily, they called it a hate crime, and some look at it as, well, it's because it was a white guy, apparently, in a black church. But you made a great point just a moment ago about the hostility toward Christians, and it was a church. So maybe that's what they're talking about. They haven't explained it to us."

The night following the attack, Jon Stewart delivered a monologue on The Daily Show discussing the tragic nature of the news, condemning the attacks as well as the media's response to it. Stewart argued that in response to Islamic terrorism, politicians declare they will do "whatever we can" to make America safe, even justifying torture, but respond to this mass shooting with "what are you gonna do, crazy is as crazy does".

In an online forum, Charles Cotton, a lawyer in Houston and a national board member of the National Rifle Association, placed blame for the shooting on the Rev. Clementa Pinckney for not allowing the churchgoers to hold concealed carry weapons inside the church. In 2011, Pinckney had voted against legislation that would allow concealed handguns to be carried into public places. Cotton also criticized the effectiveness of gun-free zones, stating, "If we look at mass shootings that occur, most happen in gun-free zones." Cotton's comment has since been deleted from the online forum.

Following the Charleston church shootings, Rhodesians Worldwide, an online magazine catering to the Rhodesian expatriate community, issued a brief statement condemning Roof's actions, particularly his use of the Rhodesian flag. In a disclaimer, the online magazine pointed out that 80% of the Rhodesian Security Forces were black people and stressed that the Rhodesian Bush War was a struggle against Communism rather than a racial conflict.

Jerry Richardson, the owner of the NFL's Carolina Panthers, donated $100,000 to the Mother Emanuel Hope Fund set up by Mayor Riley, specifically calling for $10,000 to each of the families of the nine victims to cover their funeral expenses, and the remaining $10,000 to be delivered to the Emanuel AME Church itself.

"Terrorism" terminology debate

While some media professionals, politicians and law enforcement officials referred to the attack as terrorism, others did not. This renewed a debate about the proper terminology to use when describing the shooting and other attacks.

An article by CNN National Security Analyst Peter Bergen and David Sterman says, "By any reasonable standard, this is terrorism, which is generally defined as an act of violence against civilians by individuals or organizations for political purposes." It says, "deadly acts of terrorism by virulent racists and anti-government extremists have been more common in the United States than deadly acts of jihadist terrorism since 9/11."

Some publications and analyses of the event posit that these naming discrepancies reflect forms of denial or outright racism.

Professor and terrorism expert Brian Phillips offer his definition of terrorism and said "...the massacre in Charleston, S.C. Wednesday was clearly a terrorist act." He acknowledged a political motive only "seems likely" and that his "intimidation of a wider audience" criteria was met when the shooter allegedly left someone alive to spread an unspecified message.

FBI Director James Comey said, "Terrorism is act of violence done or threatens to in order to try to influence a public body or citizenry so it's more of a political act and again based on what I know so more I don't see it as a political act. Doesn't make it any less horrific the label but terrorism has a definition under federal law."

External links

• The Last Rhodesian via Archive.org