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 "The parishioners had Bibles. Dylann Roof had his .45 caliber
Glock pistol and eight magazines loaded with hollow point bullets,"
U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said after a federal grand jury
returned the 33-count indictment against Roof.
The 21-year-old is accused of the deadly shooting spree last month
at Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
The indictment says he targeted the victims on the basis of race, in
a house of worship, "in order to make his attack more notorious."
Roof planned the June 17 attack for several months, Lynch said at a
press conference to announce the indictment. She said he singled out
the nearly 200-year-old church known as "Mother Emanuel" because of
its historical significance in the African-American community.
The federal government has not decided if it will seek the death
penalty if Roof is convicted, Lynch said. She said officials will
consider factors including the wishes of the families of the
shooting victims.
 Lynch noted that relatives signaled their anger toward Roof as well
as a readiness to forgive him, during a series of wrenching
statements at the suspect's first court appearance two days after
the massacre.
Roof already faces nine murder counts, plus charges of attempted
murder and firearms violations, brought by state prosecutors.
The massacre has triggered soul-searching over race relations in the
U.S. South, with its history of slavery and segregation. A long
debate about the Confederate flag came to a head after the massacre,
when photos of Roof draped in the flag surfaced on a website with a
racist manifesto. South Carolina removed the flag, a Civil War-era
symbol, from the state house grounds.
South Carolina is one of the few U.S. states that has no hate crime
statute on its books, contributing the Justice Department's pursuit
of the federal indictment.
"The full weight of the national government and our federal judicial
system is being brought against this man, as is the full weight of
our state judicial system," said Charleston Mayor Joe Riley. "It's
important that every legal avenue is used to have this man be held
accountable for his brutal, vicious, hateful act."
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South Carolina officials have also said they were considering
whether to seek the death penalty.
“Please don’t suggest that people in South Carolina will not render
justice here, because we will," U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham told CNN
after the federal indictment. "Please don’t suggest for one moment
that justice will not be delivered here without the Attorney General
of the United States."
Doug Jones, who prosecuted two white supremacists who bombed the
16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama in 1963, said the
hate crime charges would play a valuable role in bringing justice in
the South Carolina case.
"It’s important to play up the racial hatred as the genesis of this
crime so people are reminded what hate can really do in our
society," Jones said in a phone interview. "People need to
understand that hate is more than screaming at people and racial
slurs. It kills."
(Additional reporting by Susan Heavey, Julia Edwards and Lindsay
Dunsmuir in Washington, Harriet McLeod in Charleston, S.C., Letitia
Stein in Tampa, Fla., and David Adams in Miami; Editing by Frank
McGurty and David Gregorio)
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