A former friend who had reconnected with the man accused of a shooting massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, said Dylann Storm Roof had become an avowed racist.
Joey Meek reconnected with Roof a few weeks ago and said that while they got drunk together on vodka, Roof began complaining that “blacks were taking over the world” and that “someone needed to do something about it for the white race.”
Roof, 21, is accused of fatally shooting nine people during a Bible study at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday night, ripping out a piece of South Carolina’s civic heart and adding to the ever-growing list of America’s racial casualties.
Police captured Roof in Shelby, North Carolina, after a motorist spotted him at a traffic light on her way to work. His apprehension ended an intense, hours-long manhunt.
Roof waived extradition and was back in Charleston on Thursday night with a bond hearing pending, authorities said.
Charleston officials announced a prayer vigil for Friday evening. The city’s mayor described the shooting at the church as an act of “pure, pure concentrated evil.”
The victims included a state senator who doubled as the church’s minister, three other pastors, a regional library manager, a high school coach and speech therapist, a government administrator, a college enrollment counselor and a recent college graduate – six women and three men who felt called to open their church to all.
Obama condemns ‘senseless’ killings
In televised remarks to the press, President Barack Obama said he and his wife, Michelle, personally know several members of the church, including the pastor who was murdered.
“To say our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and community doesn’t say enough to communicate the heartache, sadness and anger that we feel,” Obama said.
The president condemned the killings as “senseless.”
Obama noted Emanuel African Methodist’s long involvement in the nation’s civil rights movement.
“Mother Emmanuel is in fact more than a church,” he said. “This was a place of worship founded by African-Americans seeking liberty.”
He said Americans must come to terms with increasing gun violence in the nation.
“Now is the time for mourning and for healing, but let’s be clear — at some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries,” he said.
Wednesday’s incident was at least the 11th time the president has publicly addressed the country following a mass shooting, a review of White House records shows.
Killer belived to have acted alone
It’s not clear whether Roof had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina, but he appears to be a “disaffected white supremacist,” based on his Facebook page, said Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama.
On his Facebook page, Roof displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes, posing with a Confederate flags plate on his car and wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe.
His previous record includes misdemeanor drug and trespassing charges.
Spilling blood inside a black church – especially “Mother Emanuel,” founded in 1816 – evoked painful memories nationwide, a reminder that black churches so often have been the targets of racist violence.
A church founder, Denmark Vesey, was hanged after trying to organize a slave revolt in 1822, and white landowners burned the church in revenge, leaving parishioners to worship underground until after the Civil War. The congregation rebuilt and grew stronger, eventually winning campaigns for voting rights and political representation.
Its lead pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney – among the dead – recalled his church’s history in a 2013 sermon, saying “we don’t see ourselves as just a place where we come to worship, but as a beacon and as a bearer of the culture.”
“What the church is all about,” Pinckney said, is the “freedom to be fully what God intends us to be and have equality in the sight of God. And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that.”
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