At about 8 P.M. last night, a young man walked into the Emanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston and took a seat. Others in the church were taking part in a weekly Bible study and prayer circle. He “stayed there for almost an hour before the event,” as Police Chief Greg Mullen said at a press conference at seven this morning. The event was the man taking a gun—the police haven’t said what kind yet—and shooting nine people in the church dead. He is in custody; at the press conference, the police chief showed grainy pictures, stills from security footage, and an image of his car, a black Hyundai, and asked for help in identifying him. Three hours later, there was a name: Dylann Roof, twenty-one years old, of Lexington, South Carolina. An hour after that, by 11:30 A.M., Roof had been caught. He had driven to North Carolina, and was two hundred and fifty miles from Charleston.
Roof is a slim white man, about five-nine; in the security photos, he was wearing jeans, a gray pullover, and Timberland boots. The victims were all black; the congregation has historically been black, too. “There’s absolutely no doubt in my mind that this is a hate crime,” Mullen said, in answer to a question. He had used similar words when he spoke in the middle of the night, and explained that the hate-crime designation facilitated the involvement of other law-enforcement and federal agencies. (Later, Attorney General Loretta Lynch confirmed that the Justice Department was investigating the incident as a hate crime.) Mayor Joe Riley, who was standing next to him, said that it was an “unfathomable and unspeakable act by somebody filled with hate, and with a deranged mind.”
That the shooter was filled with hate, at least, seems almost certain—how do you sit at prayer with people for an hour and then kill them? But, while hatred and madness can go together, the “deranged” judgment should wait until we know more about whom we are dealing with. Roof’s mental-health history is not clear. There may be other labels that turn out to be appropriate, like domestic terrorist. Immediately after Roof’s name was released, pictures from his Facebook page circulated; in one, he appeared to be wearing patches of the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia. That is more than suggestive. There is also a mug shot in circulation: Roof was, according to press reports, arrested on March 1st, on a drug charge, and on April 26th, for trespassing. He was out on bond. Sometime in April, he had his twenty-first birthday; one of his presents, from a relative, was, according to a Reuters report, a gun.
President Barack Obama, speaking just after noon, spoke of his “deep sorrow,” and the “heartbreak, and the sadness, and the anger.” He said that he knew one of the victims, Clementa Pinckney, the church’s pastor. Pinckney was also a state senator—in other words, this might also be seen as a political murder. He had become a preacher when he was eighteen—three years younger than Roof. There is a report on NBC, based on what a relative of Pinckney’s says a survivor told her, that the shooter asked to sit next to Pinckney, and that, when the shooting started, Pinckney tried to talk him out of it, as the shooter reloaded five times and talked about black people taking over the country, and raping women, and how they had to “go." Pinckney was forty-one, and, according to the Charleston Post and Courier, married, with two children. There were two other men and six women among the victims, and statements from family and witnesses suggested that at least some of them were older people. The Post and Courier quoted John Quil Lance, who was waiting for news of his grandmother, Ethel Lance. “I’m lost,” he said. “She’s a Christian, hardworking; I could call my granny for anything. I don’t have anyone else like that.”
[Update: Ethel Lance was later confirmed dead. The other victims were Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Depayne Doctor, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Tywanza Sanders, Daniel Simmons, Sr., and Mira Thompson. They ranged in age from twenty-six to eighty-seven.]
There was a certain caution in the comments of the police chief and mayor at this morning’s press conference: for the moment, they circled around the question of what sort of hate we might be witnessing. “We don’t know if anyone was targeted, other than the church itself,” Mullen said at the press conference, before Roof’s identity was known. The mayor, too, focussed on the crime scene as a place of worship. “Of all communities for Charleston, to have a horrible, hateful person go into a church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond incomprehensible, and is not explained,” Riley said. He mentioned that this was a “historic church,” and that the black church had a historic role, a reminder that a congregation can also be a community. He said that Charleston “honors our religious institutions and respects the different cultures and beliefs—we call it the Holy City, with all the spires that reach up to the sky.” And yet this was a church whose first home was burned to the ground by the city’s white citizens, in the eighteen-twenties, in retribution for a planned slave rebellion. Almost three dozen black Charlestonians were also executed, including Denmark Vesey, one of the church’s founders. In 1799, Vesey, whose master hired him out as a carpenter, had bought a lottery ticket, and won. He bought his own freedom, but his wife’s master wouldn’t let him buy hers; every time she and Vesey had a child, the master, under the law, gained a slave. Charleston is also next to North Charleston, where Walter Scott was killed by a policeman for no good reason earlier this year.
Obama, in his statement, spoke of the burning of the church as part of the fight to end slavery; he noted that the present building had been a way station for speakers and marchers during the civil-rights movement; when he called it “sacred ground,” it was clear that he meant the term in more than one sense. But Obama also spoke passionately about the American pathology of gun violence—“at some point, it’s going to be important for the American people to get a grip on this”—and acknowledged that, in terms of passing gun-control laws, the politics were against him. Indeed, he sounded more optimistic about where America was headed on race than where it is mired on guns.
The mayor and the police chief were likely just being careful. They couldn’t, again, know exactly what the murderer of these nine people was thinking—although, between the reports about Roof (who is still only a suspect) and of what the survivors heard, we are getting the picture. As Margaret Talbot wrote in the magazine this week, in a piece on the shooting of three Muslim-American students in North Carolina, hate can serve as an accelerant of violence. So can a gun, in the hands of a man like the suspect, who doesn’t, in the pictures, look particularly big—or in anyone’s hands. And there can be many kinds of hate afoot in this country.
But it is precisely at moments like this that it can be helpful to speak certain words clearly—words like racism. Riley, who has been mayor since 1975 and has brought much of the city together, is well-positioned to do that. He has, in the past, taken important steps, such as leading a march to the State Capitol asking that legislators stop flying the Confederate flag. (It’s still there.) The need for clear speech extends beyond race, something that Riley likely also knows—he is a member of Mike Bloomberg’s coalition of Mayors Against Illegal Guns. Riley has already spoken many of the right words—saying, of the victims, “We will work to heal them, and love them, and support them, and that church, as long as we live,” and, after the arrest, “In America, we don’t let bad people like this get away with this dastardly deed.” Governor Nikki Haley spoke after Riley and, as she, too, spoke about healing, she broke down crying. Other politicians, from Hillary Clinton, who had just left Charleston when the shooting occurred, to Jeb Bush, who, with the shooter still not in custody, cancelled a visit to the city, will have to be part of that conversation, too, as Charleston takes on, above all, the task of supporting the victims of this shooting and their survivors. There is, though, more for them to say, about demons that have not only been abruptly visited on this city, or this country—“incomprehensible” to both—but those who have long inhabited it.
