CHARLESTON, S.C. -- A white man accused of opening fire in a historic black church Wednesday night and killing nine people was arrested without resistance Thursday after an all-night manhunt, said the police chief in Charleston, S.C.
Dylann Storm Roof, 21, is suspected of walking into a prayer meeting Wednesday night and sitting among black parishioners for nearly an hour before opening fire on them, Police Chief Greg Mullen said.
Roof was arrested after someone spotted his car in Shelby, N.C., nearly four hours away, and reported it to authorities.
The chief wouldn't discuss any possible motive in the case.
Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. called the shootings "pure, pure concentrated evil." Stunned community leaders and politicians condemned the attack at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department has begun investigating the shootings as a hate crime.
President Barack Obama, speaking at the White House, said, "To say that our thoughts and prayers are with them and their families and their community doesn't say enough to convey the heartache and the sadness and the anger that we feel."
Obama said he personally knew slain pastor Clementa Pinckney as well as other church members. Obama called the shooting "particularly heartbreaking" because it took place in a place of worship where blacks worked to end slavery.
The president called for such shootings to stop.
"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," Obama said.
Pinckney, 41, was a married father of two and a state senator who had spent 19 years in the South Carolina Legislature. He became the youngest member of the state's House of Representatives when he was first elected as a Democrat at age 23.
"He had a core not many of us have," said state Sen. Vincent Sheheen, who sat beside Pinckney in the Senate. "I think of the irony that the most gentle of the 46 of us -- the best of the 46 of us in this chamber -- is the one who lost his life."
The shootings cut into the heart of the community. Among the slain were civic leaders -- including three pastors, a regional library manager, a college enrollment counselor and a high school track coach. The shootings left the church -- the oldest AME church in the South -- with just one living minister.
"We woke up today and the heart and soul of South Carolina was broken," Gov. Nikki Haley said through tears at a news conference.
In addition to Pinckney, the other victims were identified as Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; the Rev. Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; and DePayne Doctor, 49.
"Immediately, my heart started to sink, because I knew that this was going to mean a forever impact on many, many people," Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten said after hearing of the shooting.
Wooten said autopsies would be performed over the next several days. She did not have specific information on how many times the victims were shot or the locations of their injuries.
Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Pinckney's, said in an interview with NBC News that a survivor of the shooting had told her the gunman reloaded five times. The survivor said the gunman had entered the church and asked for the pastor. Then he sat next to Pinckney during the Bible study before opening fire.
"I have to do it," the gunman was quoted as saying. "You rape our women, and you're taking over our country. And you have to go."
Waived extradition
It was Roof's childhood friend Joseph Meek Jr. who alerted the FBI about Roof after recognizing him in a church camera image that was released early Thursday morning by Charleston authorities. Meek reportedly recognized the stained sweatshirt Roof had been wearing while playing Xbox video games recently in Meek's home.
Later Thursday morning, authorities west of Charlotte, N.C., received a report that the suspect's car had been seen heading west, said Jeff Ledford, the police chief in Shelby, N.C. Officers pulled over the driver and arrested Roof just before 11 a.m. eastern time, about 14 hours after the attack.
A gun was found in the car, Mullen said.
Roof waived extradition and was flown from North Carolina on Thursday afternoon, authorities said. He was being held at a jail pending a bond hearing, Charleston police tweeted Thursday evening. Roof also waived his right to legal counsel, meaning he will either represent himself or hire his own lawyer.
Roof, state court files show, has previously been arrested on minor offenses, including a trespassing charge in Richland County, for which he was sentenced last month to 12 days in jail; and a drug possession first-offense charge in March in neighboring Lexington County. That case is still pending.
Meek said he and Roof had been best friends in middle school, then had lost touch for years until Roof reappeared a few weeks ago.
"All of the sudden out of the blue, he started talking about race. He started talking about Trayvon Martin," Meek said Thursday after he was questioned by authorities. (Martin was a black 17-year-old who was fatally shot in Sanford, Fla., by neighborhood watch volunteer George Zimmerman.)
Roof "said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race. He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I said, 'That's not the way it should be.' But he kept talking about it."
The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil-rights group in Montgomery, Ala., that tracks hate organizations and extremists, said it didn't know about Roof before the shooting.
The center's president, Richard Cohen, said it wasn't clear whether Roof had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina.
Roof's Facebook profile picture showed him wearing a jacket with a green-and-white flag patch, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, the African country that became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the era of white minority rule that ended in the 1990s.
Roof displayed a Confederate flag on his license plate, said Meek's mother, Kimberly Konzny, but that is not unusual in the South.
David Thomas, the special agent in charge of the FBI's bureau in Columbia, S.C., said Roof, whose current address is listed as Eastover, outside of Columbia, had not been someone the agency was watching.
"I don't know what was going through his head," said Konzny. "He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends."
Grieving and vigils
A few bouquets of flowers tied to a police barricade outside the church formed a small but growing memorial Thursday.
"I'm in shock," Bob Dyer, who works in the area, said after leaving an arrangement of yellow flowers.
At a vigil in the Morris Brown AME Church, just blocks from the shooting, people joined hands and looked upward, swaying and singing as a chorus of "We Shall Overcome" echoed through the room.
The mood was at times grieving, at times hopeful and at times resilient. Calls of "enough is enough" came as the Rev. John Richard Bryant called for an end to gun violence. Near the vigil's end, the pastor looked out on the packed-to-the-walls crowd and said: "You look like a quilt. You look like patches. You all fit somewhere."
Gov. Haley said: "When hate happens, we come together, and that's what we'll do. So right now we grieve. And then we'll heal. And when we heal, we end up stronger than we started."
Other political leaders across the country addressed the attack.
This shooting "should be a warning to us all that we do have a problem in our society," said South Carolina state Rep. Wendell Gilliard, a Democrat whose district includes the church. "There's a race problem in our country. There's a gun problem in our country. We need to act on them quickly."
"Of all cities, in Charleston, to have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained," Mayor Riley said. "We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family."
NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said "there is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people."
In Washington, GOP presidential contender Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky said at Faith & Freedom Coalition's annual conference that a "sickness" in the country is responsible for the mass shootings in South Carolina, adding that the problem "isn't going to be fixed by your government."
"What kind of person goes into church and shoots nine people?" Paul said. "There's a sickness in our country. There's something terribly wrong. ... It's people not understanding where salvation comes from. I think if we understand that, we'll have better expectations of what to expect from government."
Democratic presidential contender Hillary Rodham Clinton of New York also addressed the shootings. At a meeting of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials in Las Vegas, she said the country has "to face hard truths about race, violence, guns and division."
"How many innocent people in our country, from little children to church members to movie theater attendees, how many people do we need to see cut down before we act?" the former U.S. secretary of state asked, alluding to mass shootings in a Connecticut elementary school and a Colorado movie theater.
In an email to supporters, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders of Vermont, another Democratic candidate for president, called the shooting "an act of terror."
"Nine of our fellow Americans were murdered while praying in a historic church because of the color of their skin," Sanders said, adding: "This hateful killing is a horrific reminder that, while we have made important progress in civil rights for all of our people, we are far from eradicating racism."
Former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush, who announced Monday his candidacy for the GOP presidential nomination, had planned to campaign in Charleston on Thursday, but he canceled the event in the wake of the attack.
"Our hearts are broken at the senseless loss of life," Bush said in a statement.
The attack came two months after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by a white police officer in neighboring North Charleston, which increased racial tensions in the state. The officer awaits trial on a murder charge, and the shooting prompted South Carolina to pass a law, co-sponsored by Pinckney, to equip police statewide with body cameras.
Information for this article was contributed by Jeffrey Collins, Russ Bynum, Alex Sanz, Meg Kinnard, David Goldman, Jay Reeves, Eric Tucker, Jacob Jordan, Nicholas Riccardi, Lisa Lerer, Steve Peoples, Tom Beaumont and Mitch Weiss of The Associated Press; by Jason Horowitz, Nick Corasaniti, Richard Perez-Pena, Michael D. Shear, Michael S. Schmidt, Ashley Southall and Penn Bullock of The New York Times; and by David Weigel of Bloomberg News.
A Section on 06/19/2015