nine people at a historic black church in South Carolina has
confessed to the crime, US media reported Friday, citing
unnamed officials.
One law enforcement official said that the alleged shooter
Dylann Roof told investigators that he “wanted to start a
race war” when he walked into the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday
night and opened fire on a Bible study class.
All of the victims were black.
Roof — who
was arrested
in North
Carolina on
Thursday and
brought back
to South
Carolina after
to fight
extradition —
was due in
court later
Friday for a
bond hearing.
“We are
getting
cooperation
at this point,” another official told local ABC affiliate WCIV.
Two sources also confirmed that Roof — whose Facebook
page includes a picture of him wearing the flags of defunct
white supremacist regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia —
has confessed.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said Friday she
believed Roof should face the death penalty if convicted.
Capital punishment is legal in the southern state.
“This is an absolute hate crime,” she told NBC’s “Today”
show.
“We will absolutely will want him to have the death penalty.
This is the worst hate that I’ve seen and the country has
seen in a long time,” she said.
“We will fight this and we will fight this as hard as we can.”
The carnage was the worst at a US place of worship in
decades and recalled the darkest periods of US history, in a
church once burned to the ground after a failed slave revolt.
The young white man , Dylann Roof has been charged with
nine murders, city police said Friday.
Charleston Police said on Twitter that 21-year-old Dylann
Roof would face a bond hearing at 2:00 pm (1800 GMT). He
has been charged with the killings as well as possession of
a firearm during a violent crime.
Several US media outlets have reported that Roof confessed
to investigators that he walked into the Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday
night and opened fire on a Bible study class.
The carnage was the worst at a US place of worship in
decades. All of the victims were black.
South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley said Friday she
believed Roof should face the death penalty if convicted.
Capital punishment is legal in the southern state.
Quiet loner or racist monster — who is Charleston suspect?
A week ago, Dylann Roof is said to have bragged that he
wanted to kill a bunch of people.
But the skinny 21-year-old high school dropout with a
boyish bowl-style haircut — and a menacing, dead-eyed
scowl, at least in a photo on Facebook — apparently has a
dry wit. So no one paid attention.
In the end, Roof — middle name Storm — seems to have
been very, very serious.
The South Carolina man was to appear in court Friday,
charged with nine counts of murder in a shooting rampage
in an historic African American church in Charleston. Roof
is white; the victims were all black.
Conflicting descriptions are emerging of the latest
protagonist in a mass shooting in racially tense, gun-
crazed America.
Roof was quiet and introverted — a soft-spoken loner, one
narrative says.
No, he was a bomb waiting to go off, bristling with hatred —
a calculating believer in racial segregation. Indeed, he
wanted to kill blacks to stir up another war, says the
opposing one.
An uncle of Roof, Carson Cowles, is quoted as saying
Roof’s paroxysm of violence at Emanuel African Methodist
Episcopal Church came out of the blue.
Cowles said he got word to turn on the television Thursday
when Roof was identified in surveillance footage from
outside the church as the suspect in the shooting.
Roof allegedly sat in on a Bible study class for an hour
before opening fire on the worshippers around him, and left
some alive to tell about it afterwards.
“I watched it for 10 minutes, trying to convince myself this
is just a nightmare, and I need to wake up,” Cowles was
quoted as saying in the Los Angeles Times.
“None of us saw it coming, but here we are, and there’s no
turning back,” said Cowles.
But Roof himself told investigators he wanted to start a race
war, one law enforcement official told CNN Friday.
— ‘Flat out’ warning of plan —
Friends of Roof say he had in fact talked of killing — and
even said when and where.
Christon Scriven, who is black, says Roof warned last week
that on Wednesday — the exact day of the shooting, in the
end — he wanted to kill people at a local college.
“He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff,” Scriven
told the New York Daily News. “He’s weird. You don’t know
when to take him seriously and when not to.”
Only the location of the killing turned out to be different.
Roof’s roommate at the trailer park where they lived in the
city of Lexington — outside the state capital Columbia —
said he had been planning something awful.
“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Dalton 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.”
But Joey Meek, a childhood friend of Roof, said he had black
friends and was not in the habit of disparaging African
Americans.
“He never said the n-word, he never made racial slurs, he
never targeted a specific black person,” Meek told ABC
News. “He never did any of that, so it was just pretty much a
shock.”
But the time prior to Roof’s alleged murder spree does
suggest he was a troubled, biased person.
In a picture on his Facebook page, he is seen wearing a
patch with the flag of apartheid-era South Africa and
another of the flag of Rhodesia, the white-ruled country that
eventually became Zimbabwe.
Roof dropped out of high school and was once arrested for
possessing a drug used to treat addiction to opiates, news
reports said.
His uncle was quoted as saying that in April, Roof got a .45
Glock gun from his father as a birthday present.
Two weeks ago, Roof went on a drunken rant about
segregation and killing people, Meek said.
Meek took the gun away from Roof but gave it back the next
day, he told the Daily News.
“I only took it away because he was drunk. I didn’t take him
seriously,” Meek said. “I do feel a little guilty because I
could have let someone know.”
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