Hate crime leaves 9 dead in South Charleston, S.C.

Shock hit the news airwaves as reports of gunfire erupted in a historic African American church in South Carolina.

On June 17, Dylann Roof, opened fire at the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in South Charleston. He killed 6 women and 3 men.

Hate Crime Leaves Nine Dead

Among the dead is The Rev. Clementa Pinckney above who also served as the Senator of South Carolina.

Authorities are investigating this as a hate crime and an act of terrorism.

Law enforcement officials arrested Roof after a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina, about 220 miles (350 km) north of Charleston, said police chief Gregory Mullen.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said her office was investigating whether to charge Roof with a hate crime motivated by racial or other prejudice. Such crimes typically carry harsher penalties.

“The fact that this took place in a black church obviously raises questions about a dark part of our history,” U.S. President Barack Obama told reporters. “We don’t have all the facts but we know that, once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

Alleged suspect

Roof sat with churchgoers inside Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for about an hour on Wednesday before opening fire, Mullen said, adding that police believe Roof acted alone.

Court documents show that prosecutors charged Roof twice earlier this year

• once with a drug offense
• once with trespassing.

In a Facebook profile that appears to belong to him, he wears a jacket prominently featuring:

• the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe
• from when the two African countries were ruled by their white counterparts.

The shooter told one survivor he would let her live so she could tell others what happened, the president of the Charleston NAACP, Dot Scott, told the local Post and Courier newspaper.

A cousin of Pinckney’s, Sylvia Johnson, told MSNBC that a survivor of the shooting told her the gunman reloaded five times during the attack during a Bible-study group. Pinckney tried to talk him out of it, she said.

“He just said, ‘I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country,” Johnson said.

“It is a very, very sad day in South Carolina. It is a day that we will get through,” Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, told reporters. “Parents are having to explain to their kids how they can go to church and feel safe. That’s not something we ever thought we’d deal with.”