NY Times reports – CHARLESTON, S.C. — The gunman wanted in the killing of nine people at a prayer meeting at a historic black church in this city’s downtown area was taken into custody Thursday morning in North Carolina.
Charleston’s police chief, Greg Mullen, said the suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, 21, had been caught about 200 miles away, in Shelby, N.C., a town west of Charlotte. His arrest came about 14 hours after the shooting.
The police here have said Mr. Roof, who is from the Columbia, S.C., area, is the white gunman who walked into a prayer meeting, sat down with black parishioners for nearly an hour, and then opened fire — a burst of violence that officials described as racially motivated.
Dylann Storm Roof wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa, top, and Rhodesia, as modern-day Zimbabwe was called during a period of white rule.
Chief Mullen said that Mr. Roof was located after a resident alerted police to a suspicious vehicle. Mr. Roof did not offer any resistance, the police chief said.
Mr. Roof’s Facebook profile picture shows him wearing a jacket decorated with the flags of two former white supremacist regimes, in apartheid-era South Africa and in Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe.
The gunman walked into the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after 8 p.m., and the first call to police came shortly after 9 p.m. Among the dead was the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, pastor of the church, who was also a state senator.
Photo
Charleston police released a photograph taken from surveillance footage of Mr. Roof, who is believed to be the gunman. Credit Charleston Police Department, via Reuters
Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Mr. Pinckney, told NBC News that she had spoken with a survivor of the shooting who told her the gunman reloaded five times. The survivor, she said, told her that the gunman had entered the church and asked for the pastor. Then he sat next to Mr. 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.”
Calling the shooting the work of “a hateful and deranged mind,” Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. said it was hard to imagine churchgoers at “a prayer service and a Bible service, and they’re speaking about the Holy Scriptures and praying,” while someone is “sitting there contemplating the act of murder.”
Source : NY Times