Charleston shooting suspect Dylann Roof 'wanted to ignite civil war'

[umbertino]

Roommate says 21-year-old had been ‘planning something like that for six months’ after massacre that killed nine black churchgoers in South Carolina

 

 

Michael Safi, Jessica Glenza and Amanda Holpuch

 

Friday 19 June 2015 07.48 BST

 

 

 

The 21-year-old accused of killing nine black churchgoers in Charleston, South Carolina, had been “planning something like that for six months”, his roommate has revealed, as friends recalled Dylann Roof’s tirades against African Americans “taking over the world” and his desire to ignite “a civil war”.

 

The killings have sent shockwaves across the US, as the nation confronts a breaking point over race and gun violence following yet another mass shooting. Hundreds of people gathered to pay their respects outside the Emanuel AME Church – the scene of the shooting – on Thursday evening, with more prayer services held throughout Charleston.

 

A day after the massacre – labelled a “hate crime” by South Carolina police – a portrait of Roof as an apparently committed racist is building from interviews with associates of the young man, shown in Facebook photos wearing a jacket bearing the flags of the former white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.

 

Joseph Meek Jr, a childhood friend who saw Roof the morning of the shooting, said the pair had never discussed race growing up. But when they recently reconnected, Roof told him “blacks were taking over the world [and] someone needed to do something about it for the white race”, he told the Associated Press.

 

“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.”

 

Meek said that when he woke up on Wednesday morning Roof was at his house, sleeping in his car outside – its license plate bearing the confederate flag.

 

Later that day, Meek said he and some friends had gone to a nearby lake but Roof stayed behind, deciding he’d rather see a movie. The next time he saw Roof was in surveillance-camera photos distributed by police in the aftermath of the killing. “I knew it was him,” Meek said.

 

A roommate, Dalton Tyler, said Roof had been “planning something like that for six months”.

 

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC News. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

 

He said Roof had been “on and off” with his parents, but they had previously bought him a gun. He hadn’t been allowed to take it with him until this week, Tyler said.

 

Roof’s uncle Carson Cowles said the gun, a .45-caliber pistol, had been a gift for the introverted young man’s 21st birthday.

 

“I said he was like 19 years old, he still didn’t have a job, a driver’s license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time,” Cowles said. “I don’t have any words for it. Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming.”

 

A high school contemporary, John Mullins, told the Daily Beast: “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.” But now, he said, it seemed that “the things he said were kind of not joking”.

 

Richard Cohen, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said Roof was not known to his organisation, which tracks hate crimes across the US, but based on his Facebook page he appeared to be a “disaffected white supremacist”.

 

Others expressed surprise at Roof’s crimes. “I never thought he’d do something like this,” a high school friend, Antonio Metze, told AP. “He had black friends.”

 

Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny, described him as a “sweet kid”. “He was quiet. He only had a few friends,” she said.

 

Though police say Roof lived in Columbia, South Carolina, he apparently had ties to the nearby Lexington area. Roof had a mixed educational record in the Lexington school district, attending White Knoll high school in both the 2008-09 and 2009-10 school years.

 

Roof previously had at least two run-ins with the law. The Lexington county district attorney’s office confirmed that Roof had been charged with possession of a controlled substance in March but the circumstances surrounding that arrest remain unclear.

 

He was also arrested in April for misdemeanour trespassing in Lexington county.

 

On Thursday, police released Roof’s mugshot and moved him from police custody in North Carolina on his way back to face charges in South Carolina.

 

Reuters reports that Roof had lived with his older sister Amber and their father part-time until his father and stepmother divorced. A profile on TheKnot.com shows that Amber Roof is scheduled to be married on Sunday in Lexington, South Carolina, according to Reuters.

 

After his capture in Shelby, North Carolina, on Thursday morning – after a florist spotted and tailed his car – Roof was extradited to Charleston, where he is being held in isolation at a detention centre facing nine counts of murder, according to Live5 news.

 

On Thursday, President Barack Obama addressed the nation from the White House, expressing heartache at the killings and saying American communities have had to endure such tragedies too many times.

 

“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. “It doesn’t happen in other places with this kind of frequency – and it is in our power to do something about it.”

 

The Charleston mayor, Joseph P Riley Jr, said at a press conference: “In America, you know, we don’t let bad people like this get away with these dastardly deeds.”

 

The streets outside of Emanuel church were crowded with people on Thursday night who wished to pay their respects to the dead: Cynthia Hurd, 54; Susie Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49; Clementa Pickney, 41; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Daniel Simmons, 74; Sharonda Singleton, 45, and Myra Thompson, 59.

 

“It’s just mind-boggling, I don’t have the right words to say it. Just shock,” said Marymargaret Givens, a 60-year-old housekeeper who works a few blocks away. “The way it happened. They were just innocent people. They were godly people.” She gazed back towards the church, said a prayer for the dead and then walked away.

 

“It was an evil that was incomprehensible,” said Pastor Cress Darwin, who had earlier led a prayer session at the Second Presbyterian Church next door to Emanuel AME. As throngs of worshippers poured out on to the streets, many in tears, Darwin continued: “But this community is coming together. Because of it we will be more vigilant in terms of our security. But because of who we serve, we will not stop welcoming in the stranger, because death is not the last word.”

 

Fifty-seven-year-old Marilyn Martin had attended school with Myra Thompson and had known Tywanza Sanders. She described Sanders as a “strong man with a good head on his shoulders”. The 26-year-old, she said, had just graduated college and “couldn’t wait to be a productive citizen”.

 

Vigils were also held across the US, including in Nebraska, New York and Florida.

 

The African American community in Charleston and throughout the US is still reeling from the murder just 10 weeks earlier of Walter Scott, an unarmed black man shot dead by a North Charleston police officer just miles away from the site of Wednesday’s shooting.

 

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal church traces its roots to 1816 and is one of the largest black congregations south of Baltimore. The Reverend Martin Luther King Jr addressed the church in 1962.

 

 

 

Police lead suspected shooter Dylann Roof, 21, into the courthouse in Shelby, North Carolina.

Photograph: Jason Miczek/Reuters

 

 

 

An undated handout photo of Dylann Roof wearing flags of white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.

Photograph: Berkeley County/Handout/EPA

 

 

 

 

Members of Congress hold a prayer circle in front of the US Capitol to honour those gunned down at the Emanuel church.

Photograph: Mark Wilson/Getty Images

 

 

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/19/dylann-roof

 

[Bandit795]

This to me was terrorism.

[haymon]

HOME GROWN TERRORIST. FEED LIES AND HE SWALLOWED IT.

[nstoolman1]

The room mate knew he was "planning something like that for 6 months"???????

 

And he did not think to tell someone?

 

O  M   G

[SgtFuryUSCZ]

***///

 

right you are NSTOOLMAN !   "Hear something, see something, for pete's sake --- SAY SOMETHING !"

 

Stepping up does not make you a 'rat' or a 'narc', a 'stool pigeon', or a' tattle-tale'....

One MUST be responsible to live in a civilised society.

 

His friends in the know will have to live with their lack of action...

perhaps the lives of these innocent people, who were gunned down by their cowardly pal, will be on their consciences a long time...

 

We're told to report potential terrorists.... what was this coward if not a terrorist .

 

Common sense should prevail without everyone thinking they feel like a kommie for reporting someone to the cops!

 

If more people cooperated, there'd be significantly less crime as the bad eggs could be rounded up before more crimes and tragedies occur.

 

 

 

 

.

Edited June 19, 2015 by SgtFuryUSCZ

[umbertino]

This to me was terrorism.

 

http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jun/19/american-mass-shootings-terrorism-racism

[umbertino]

South Carolina Massacre: Why Don’t We Call Killing of 9 Black Churchgoers an Act of Terrorism?

 

Friday, June 19, 2015

 

 

 

http://www.democracynow.org/2015/6/19/south_carolina_massacre_why_dont_we

[umbertino]

To Mother Emanuel’s Denmark Vesey: your fight goes on!

 

by: John Wojcik

June 19 2015

 

 

 

Fighting off racist attacks is nothing new for the 199-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C. - lovingly referred to by many in Charleston as "Mother Emanuel."

 

The church which was the scene of hateful slaughter Wednesday night has a long history of resisting slavery and racism and of fighting for justice.

 

Mother Emanuel was founded by Morris Brown, a black pastor in 1816.  People in white-run Methodist and Episcopal churches down South didn't care to worship too much with black people - thus, the separate churches.

 

Martin Luther King Jr. spoke at Mother Emanuel in 1962.

 

In 1969 Coretta Scott King led a march of hospital workers demanding better pay - a march that began on the front steps of Mother Emanuel.

 

In its early years though, one of the leaders of the church was Denmark Vesey, a former slave who had been able to buy his freedom with the $1,500 winnings from a Charleston Lottery.

 

In 1822, however, the church was burned to the ground by the white landed aristocrats because it was seen as a hotbed of support for what was on its way to becoming one of the biggest slave revolts ever in the pre-Civil War South.

 

Vesey was the lead planner of a slave revolt that was to begin on the night of June 16, 1822 as the clock ticked past the twelfth hour and into June 17, the next day. (Was that timing lost on Mr. Roof as, on the 17thof June, 2015, he murdered nine people in that church after having been welcomed by them into their prayer service?)

 

Had the elaborately-planned slave revolt of June 17, 1822 actually occurred, including the mass escape to Haiti which had already freed its slaves, it would have been one of the biggest slave revolts in the history of the pre-Civil War South. The plans leaked out, however, and the revolt was quashed.

 

The timing of the mass murder this week may not have been lost on the killer but the reasons Vesey had for planning a slave revolt were totally lost on the judge who sentenced him to death.

 

The judge who ordered his execution is reported to have said: "It is difficult to imagine what infatuation could have prompted you to attempt an episode so wild and visionary. You were a free man, comely, wealthy and enjoyed every comfort compatible with your station. You had, therefore, much to risk and little to gain."

 

Today, in the streets of Charleston and in the newspapers, columns, radio shows, TV shows and on line the name of Vesey is coming up again. No one remembers the name of the judge who ordered his execution. But Vesey's name they remember. Many invoking his name today are understanding better than they did before why it was that he organized that slave revolt.

 

A community organizer outside the church in Charleston on the night of the killings Wednesday night put it this way: "I'm sick and tired of people telling me that I shouldn't be angry. I am angry."

 

 

 

Photo: Denmark Vesey.  |  Wikipedia (CC)

 

 

http://www.peoplesworld.org/to-mother-emanuel-s-denmark-vesey-your-fight-goes-on/

[EagleEye]

thanks for bringing this over Umbertino...Grazie my friend....there are no coincidences in things like this IMHO...so sad to see our once great nation spiraling out of control...but of course we have ejected GOD from nearly every facet of our lives...school...court....military...and now even our churches...GOD help us to wake up from our long slumber.... :praying:

[yota691]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jKSsY5rHNu0 

Dylann Roof's friend 'He never said anything racist'

[SgtFuryUSCZ]

***///

 

Of course he never said anything racist to this cat... as we've already determined Roof  a coward....

 

See, this cat also looks crazy enough to have opened up a 6-pack o' whoop ass on that cracka if he had !

[Jim1cor13]

This to me was terrorism.

Indeed Bandit...fueled by the scourge of "psych drugs"

that so far have been involved in every single episode such

as this...school shootings, etc. My question is WHY has no one

held the pharma's and docs accountable for treating patients

with little more than handing out these mind altering drugs?

 

I have seen first hand how many of these drugs completely alter a persons outlook and

side effects of rage and outbursts, depression, etc. are quite common. There are MORE than

one criminal in these type of events, and as usual, most ignore the "fuel".

Edited June 20, 2015 by Jim1cor13

[bohica]

To call this an act of terrorism would be to put the blame on the person as a terrorist.  Right now Obutt does not want to take the blame off of the gun and put it on the person.  He wants to demonize handguns so he can do his gun grab again.  It is terrorism if it suits Obutt but not if it does not suit obutt.  All commonsense would call it an act of terrorism but Obutt has an agenda.