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Charleston church shooting
A white-painted church at sunset.
Charleston church shooting is located in South Carolina
Charleston church shooting
Charleston church shooting (South Carolina)
LocationEmanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Charleston, South Carolina, U.S.
Coordinates32°47′14″N 79°55′59″W / 32.78722°N 79.93306°W / 32.78722; -79.93306
DateJune 17, 2015 (2015-06-17)
c. 9:05 p.m. (EDT)
TargetAfrican American Christian churchgoers
Attack type
Mass shooting, mass murder, hate crime (suspected),[1] terrorism (suspected)[2]
WeaponsGlock 41 .45-caliber handgun[3]
Deaths9[1][4]
Injured1[5]
PerpetratorsDylann Storm Roof[6]
MotiveRacism[1]

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.[7] Nine people were killed, including the senior pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, a state senator.[8] A tenth victim was also shot, but survived.[5]

In the immediate aftermath, police sought a white male later identified as Dylann Storm Roof, who was captured the morning after the attack in Shelby, North Carolina.[9] The shooting is being investigated as a hate crime and as an act of domestic terrorism by the United States Department of Justice. Roof has been charged with nine counts of murder by the State of South Carolina.[1][10]

The shooting is the deadliest attack to occur at an American place of worship since a 1991 mass shooting at a Buddhist temple in Waddell, Arizona, in which nine people also died.[11]

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.[12] The church was founded in 1816 and is the oldest of the African Methodist Episcopal Church in the South, often referred to as "Mother Emanuel".[8][13] It is the oldest historically black congregation south of Baltimore. When one of the church's co-founders, Denmark Vesey, tried to start a slave rebellion in Charleston in 1822, 35 people, including Vesey, were executed and the church was burned down.[14] Charleston citizens accepted that the 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.[15] 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"),[16] and rebuilt upon a design by Denmark Vesey's son.[15] The current structure dates from 1891.[15][16]

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.[17] 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 Ku Klux Klan (KKK) members killed four black girls and injured fourteen others, an attack that galvanized the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.[7]

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, and the KKK became an organized terrorist organization. The anti-black terrorism perpetrated by the KKK during the time period was the reason behind the passage of the first anti-terrorism law the federal government ever passed, namely the 1871 Ku Klux Klan Act.[18] However, anti-black terrorist attacks persisted, including a wave of firebombings of black churches in the South in the 1990s and a burning of a black church in Massachusetts the day President Barack Obama was inaugurated in 2009.[19][20][21][22]

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.[14] 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 on the church during a Bible study attended by Pinckney with a .45-caliber handgun and then fled.[23][24][25]

For nearly an hour prior to the attack, the shooter participated and stayed at the Bible study.[26] 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 then began to disagree when they began speaking about Scripture. After a while, the shooter then stood up and pulled out a gun from a fanny pack,[25] 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, to which 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."[27] He reloaded his gun five times. Sanders' mother and his five-year-old niece, who were both attending the study, survived the shooting by pretending to be dead.[28][29][30][31][11] 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)[32] so she could, according to him, tell other people what happened.[33] Before leaving the church, he reportedly "uttered a racially inflammatory statement" over the victims' bodies.[25]

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.[14][34]

Victims

All of the victims were black, consisting of six women and three men. Eight died at the scene, while the ninth, Daniel Simmons, died in the hospital.[24][33] They were all killed by multiple gunshots fired at close range.[11][35] 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.[36][5] The fatalities were identified as:[37][38]

  • 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

Mugshot of Roof taken by the Charleston County Sheriff's Office, June 18, 2015

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.[39] Alternatively, it has been reported that his older half-sister also reported him to the police after seeing his photo on the news.[40][41] He was born in Columbia, South Carolina, and was living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the attack.[11] Roof was unemployed.[42] His father Franklin Bennett and stepmother Paige Mann were divorced after ten years of marriage, in which Bennett was verbally and physically abusive towards Mann.[41] Prior to the attack, Roof was living alternatively in Bennett's and Mann's homes.[43]

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.[44][45][46] Another online photo showed Roof sitting on the hood of his car with an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it.[47] According to his roommate, Roof expressed his support of racial segregation in the United States and had intended to start a civil war.[48] 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.[49] He also often claimed that "blacks were taking over the world."[50] 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.[51][43] However, it was noted by a former high school classmate that despite racist comments he made, a number of Roof's friends were black.[52]

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.[52][53][51][41]

He had a prior criminal record consisting of two arrests, both made in the months preceding the attack.[54][55] On March 2, 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 to three additional years.[49][52]

Roof's uncle, Carson Cowles, told Reuters 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."[56] Cowles stated that he tried to mentor Roof, but was rejected and they drifted apart.[56] He told Reuters that Roof got a .45-caliber pistol from his father for his twenty-first birthday in April.[57][58] However, other reports stated Roof purchased the gun himself, using money given to him on his birthday.[43] 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.[3] 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 were later forced to return it to him.[43] Interrogations with Roof after his arrest determined that 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.[25]

Manhunt and capture

The attack is being treated as a hate crime by police, and officials from the FBI were called in to assist in the investigation and manhunt.[24]

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 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.[9][59] Police had received a tip-off from a citizen from Gastonia, North Carolina. The citizen, Debbie Dills, had recognized Roof driving his car, a black Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina license plates and a three-flag "Confederate States of America" bumper decoration,[60][61] on U.S. Route 74, recalling security camera images taken at the church and distributed to the media. Dills 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.[62]

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.[30][63][64] 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.[65][66] He confessed to committing the attack with the intention of starting a race war,[28] 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.[27]

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."[67][64] 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 stated they were "praying for his soul."[68][42][69][25] Governor Nikki Haley has called for prosecutors to seek the death penalty for Roof.[70] Roof is scheduled to reappear in court in October 2015.[69]

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."[71] 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."[72]

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.[30] Another such ceremony occurred at the TD Arena in the College of Charleston.[35]

On June 18, the day after the shooting, many flags, including those at the South Carolina State House, were flown at half-mast. However, the Confederate flag flying over the Confederate Soldier Monument near the State House was not, due to legal and technical reasons.[73] Calls to remove the Confederate flag from statehouse grounds, as well as debates over the context of its symbolic nature, have been renewed since the attack.[74][75]

Reactions

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."[76]

The attack also prompted a response from President Barack Obama, focusing on gun control issues, saying that "this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries."[77] Obama also held a press conference on June 18, in which he said:

"[I want] to express [my] deep sorrow over the senseless murders that took place last night. 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."[78]

At least eighteen prospective candidates for the 2016 U.S. presidential election expressed reactions through various media.[79]

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."[80]

The following morning, Fox & Friends co-host Steve Doocy questioned whether the shooting might have actually been motivated by anti-Christian sentiment:

"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."[81]

In an online forum, Charles Cotton, a lawyer in Houston and a national board member of the National Rifle Association, placed the blame on 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."[82]

After Roof's appearance at his bond hearing, his family issued a statement, expressing their shock and grief at his actions.[83]

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