Accused Church Shooter to be Charged with Nine Counts of Murder
CHARLESTON, S.C., June 19 (UPI) — Dylann Roof, the man accused in a church shooting spree that left nine dead, will be charged with nine counts of murder, Charleston police said Friday.
Roof, 21, will also be charged with possession of a firearm during the commission of a violent crime, police said on Twitter. Roof is expected to make a first appearance in court at 2 p.m. Friday, where he will be formally charged. In South Carolina, where a murder conviction carries the death penalty. The Charleston police are calling the shooting a hate crime. The Justice Department is reviewing the possibility.
South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley said the state “absolutely will want him to have the death penalty.”
“This is the worst hate that I’ve seen — and that the country has seen — in a long time,” Haley said. “We will fight this, and we will fight this as hard as we can.”
Roof was being kept in protective custody at the jail, away from the other inmates, on suicide watch.
Unnamed law enforcement officials told CNN Roof confessed to the crime and purchased the .45-caliber handgun used in the shooting, refuting previous reports that his father purchased the weapon.
Police said Roof attended a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church for about an hour before opening fire at 9 p.m., Wednesday, telling the group he was there “to kill black people,” adding “you rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.”
NBC News reported that Roof “almost didn’t go through with it because everyone was so nice to him.” Instead, he decided he had to “go through with his mission.”
Roof was captured in Shelby, N.C., about a three-hour drive from the church. An alert florist on her way to work spotted Roof’s black car and followed it for about 30 miles before police arrived.
“I paid close attention to the pictures on TV, but I thought, ‘No, it can’t be him,'” she said. “I noticed the car. And I noticed the boy’s haircut.”
Roof’s friends said he wanted to start a race war, adding he would often talk about “Southern pride.”
“It was just jokes he would make, racist jokes,” former high school classmate John Mullins said.
On Friday, many were questioning why the massacre is being classified as a possible hate crime and not terrorism.
Civil rights advocates are questioning why attacks carried out by violent Muslim extremists in the United States are classified as acts of terrorism, but attacks against blacks and Muslim Americans are rarely called terrorism.
“We have been conditioned to accept that if the violence is committed by a Muslim, then it is terrorism,” said Nihad Awad, executive director of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, a civil rights advocacy group. “If the same violence is committed by a white supremacist or apartheid sympathizer and is not a Muslim, we start to look for excuses — he might be insane, maybe he was pushed too hard.”
