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 The mass shooting set off an intense 14-hour manhunt that ended
with 21-year-old Dylann Roof arrested in a traffic stop in a small
North Carolina town, 220 miles (350 km) north of Charleston, where
the church rampage occurred, officials said.
Roof, who an uncle said received a gun as a 21st birthday present in
April and whose social media profile suggests a fascination with
white supremacy, waived his right to extradition and was flown back
to South Carolina hours after his arrest.
He is due for a bail hearing on Friday but will appear by video link
from the Charleston-area detention center where he was jailed, said
Major Eric Watson, a Charleston County Sheriff's Office spokesman.
Wednesday's gun violence at the nearly 200-year-old Emanuel African
Methodist Episcopal Church follows a year of turmoil and protests
over race relations, law enforcement and criminal justice in the
United States, stemming from a string of police slayings of unarmed
black men.
Four pastors, including Democratic state Senator Clementa Pinckney,
41, were among the six women and three men shot dead at the church
nicknamed "Mother Emanuel."
 The church was burned to the ground in the late 1820s, after plans
of a slave revolt drafted by one of its founders were discovered. It
was later rebuilt.
The gunshot victims ranged in age from 26 to 87. Three who were
present survived the rampage unscathed, including a 5-year-old who,
according to CNN, avoided being shot by playing dead.
CNN also broadcast a Snapchat video taken from inside the church
during the study session, which appeared to show Roof before the
massacre.
"The fact that this took place in a black church obviously raises
questions about a dark part of our history," said U.S. President
Barack Obama. "Once again, innocent people were killed in part
because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting
their hands on a gun."
The United States has been shaken by a string of shootings in recent
years, including the 2012 massacre at Sandy Hook Elementary School,
where a gunman killed 20 children and six adults. But Democratic-led
efforts to tighten the nation's gun laws failed after that incident.
GIFT OF A GUN
Little was immediately known about Roof following his arrest. A man
who identified himself as Carson Cowles, Roof's uncle, told Reuters
that Roof's father had recently given him a .45-caliber handgun as a
birthday present and that Roof had seemed adrift.
"I don't have any words for it," Cowles, 56, said in a telephone
interview. "Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming."
In a Facebook profile apparently belonging to Roof, a portrait
showed him wearing a jacket emblazoned with the flags of
apartheid-era South Africa and of the former Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe,
both formerly ruled by white minorities. Many of his Facebook
friends were black.
Court documents show Roof was arrested on two separate occasions at
a shopping mall this year for a drug offense and trespassing. And
two school districts where he attended high school have no records
of him ever graduating.
His mother, Amy, declined to comment when reached by phone.
"We will be doing no interviews, ever," she said before hanging up.
The suspect was carrying a handgun when confronted by police who
pulled him over in North Carolina after a report that he had been
sighted there, but Roof surrendered and was taken into custody
without incident, said Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen.
Police said Wednesday night's shooting unfolded about an hour after
Roof joined a small Bible-study group in the church, welcomed
apparently as the only white participant, and suddenly opened fire
on the victims as they sat together.
Sylvia Johnson, a cousin of Pinckney, told MSNBC that a survivor
told her the gunman reloaded five times during the attack despite
pleas for him to stop.
"He just said, 'I have to do it. You rape our women and you're
taking over our country'," Johnson said.
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U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said her office was
investigating whether to charge Roof with a hate crime motivated by
racial or other prejudice.
Under federal and some state laws, such crimes typically carry
harsher penalties. But South Carolina, which has the death penalty,
is one of just five U.S. states lacking hate crime laws. RISING
RACIAL TENSIONS
The shooting marks one of the most notorious attacks on a black
church in the South since the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street
Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, which killed four girls and
helped galvanize the U.S. civil rights movement. The bombing was
tied to the Ku Klux Klan.
The bloodshed in Charleston follows a wave of racial tension and
protests stirred by recent police killings of unarmed black men in
cities across the country, that have sparked a renewed civil rights
movement under the banner of "Black Lives Matter."
In one such case in neighboring North Charleston, a white police
officer was charged with murder after he shot Walter Scott, an
unarmed black man, in the back.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, which researches U.S. hate groups,
said the latest church attack illustrates the dangers that
home-grown extremists still pose.
"Since 9/11, our country has been fixated on the threat of Jihadi
terrorism. But the horrific tragedy at the Emanuel AME reminds us
that the threat of homegrown domestic terrorism is very real," the
group said in a statement, referring to the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks
on the United States.
There have been 4,120 reported hate crimes across the United States,
including 56 murders, since 2003, the center said.
In addition to the church's leader, Pinckney, other victims included
three pastors - DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Sharonda Coleman
Singleton, 45; and Reverend Daniel Simmons, 74. Also killed were
Cynthia Hurd, 54, a public library employee; Susie Jackson, 87;
Ethel Lance, 70; Tywanza Sanders, 26; and Myra Thompson 59, an
associate pastor at the church, according to the county coroner.
As night fell on Thursday, mourners returned to the church for a
vigil, placing candles outside the building next to a growing
memorial of flowers, plush toys, balloons and placards. A woman
played "Amazing Grace" on the bagpipes across the street.
U.S. Senator Lindsey Graham, a Republican of South Carolina, joined
the subdued crowd of blacks and whites paying respects. He laid a
bunch of flowers, then stood and prayed for a few moments.
"It is very hard to understand this. To go into God's space and do
this - I just do not understand," Graham told reporters. "This is
going to rock this state."
Earlier, Governor Nikki Haley, a Republican, said in a tearful
statement: "It is a very, very sad day in South Carolina."
That grief rang hollow for some civil-rights activists, who noted
that the state capital in Columbia still flies the Confederate flag,
the rallying symbol of the pro-slavery South during the Civil War.
(Additional reporting by David Bailey in Minneapolis; Brian Snyder
in Charleston; Julia Edwards in Washington; Emily Flitter and Alana
Wise in New York; David Adams in Miami; Letitia Stein in Tampa,
Florida; Randall Hill in Charleston, South Carolina; Alex
Dobuzinskis in Los Angeles and Curtis Skinner in San Francisco;
Writing by Scott Malone and Steve Gorman; Editing by James Dalgleish
and Lisa Shumaker)
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