Just to update from my previous “on the loose” headline — if indeed the suspect and the shooter are one and the same. From The State:
A source close to the investigation says the suspect in a Charleston AME church shooting that killed nine Wednesday night was captured Thursday in Shelby, N.C.
Authorities named 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, of the Columbia area, as the suspect in the shooting that killed nine, including state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, a longtime South Carolina legislator who was pastor of the church….
“I’m wondering if we will once again learn that he was a young male with mental health issues like the Sandy Hook shooter?” -Doug
Yeah, just based on that picture, I’m going to go with crazy/evil. I mean, that picture looks like he’s auditioning to be a villain character in Stephen King story. Even the setting is creepy. What’s he doing in a swamp?
Glad they caught this guy.
I disagree — I was wondering what he was doing in a place as wholesome as outdoors in a swamp. I suppose the photo could have been taken at a survivalist training event or some similar perverted exercise, but I don’t usually think of crazed killers as nature lovers.
Maybe the swamp thing is a ‘preserving our nation’s heritage’ statement.
http://www.nps.gov/aboutus/publications.htm
Some publications have been ‘404’ed’ – not found.
Look, anyone who does something like this *has* to have mental health issues. Seriously!
Whether these issues are exculpatory remains to be seen, but I would guess not.
What a huge shame all around. Glad he’s caught!
My question was whether the mental health issues are recent or long term. A parent giving a kid like that a gun (as was done in Sandy Hook) should be held culpable.
Oh, definitely!!
For one thing, he had been arrested 2/28 for carrying Oxycodone, and his birthday was in April.
He was acting very suspiciously at the mall–asking when stores closed and how many employees they had when he was busted for the drugs. Seems like he had issues before he got the gun.
Unfathomable.
Is he a lone, independent psycho?
Is that a real duck in the photo?
What is the badge on the other side of this jacket? Richland County something?
What is on the yellow badge on the gray sweatshirt?
It looks like a canadian goose. I suppose it might be congaree swamp since he’s from Eastover. I too am curious about the Richland??? patch on the jacket – Richland is the only thing I can discern with reasonable clarity.
It’s the Richland One Academic All Stars logo. The flag patches of Rhodesia and Apartheid South Africa have been taken up by white supremacists.
Does that mean he may have been an honor student of some sort; he apparently attended rosewood, hand, and dreher at some point.
I attended hand and dreher and was an honor student. I feel like something is being stolen from me.
Sorry for the capitalization errors. Its hard to fix in the ipad. Why are there not arrow keys for the cursor?
From The State:
Roof attended several schools in the Columbia area.
He was a student in eight grade at Carolina Springs Middle School and then ninth grade at White Knoll High School in Lexington County before leaving, officials at Lexington 1 said.
Other schools he attended include Rosewood Elementary and Hand Middle in Columbia, according to yearbooks.
Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/news/local/article24869419.html#storylink=cpy
Canada goose…
…or Canada Goose Sleeper Shell Decoy?
http://www.cabelas.com/product/Hunting/Hunting-Decoys/Goose-Decoys%7C/pc/104791680/c/104714280/sc/104360580/DOA-Canada-Goose-Sleeper-Shell-Decoys/1981367.uts?destination=%2Fcategory%2FGoose-Decoys%2F104360580.uts
What is that even for?
Wildlife management?
http://charmeck.org/city/charlotte/CMPD/organization/Support/AnimalControl/livingwithwildlife/Documents/2004_Goose_Conflict_Manual.pdf
The old dead goose trick!
I wonder if he has any contacts in any of the various groups associated with Christian Identity, or any fellow travelers of that ilk? I suspect that he has friends that think and talk the same trash he does even if they haven’t acted upon it.
One difference from Sandy Hook, Columbine, Aurora CO, is that this guy seems to have gone to some trouble to travel to a specific place some distance away (pre-meditation, planning) and not just any AME church, but one with very specific historical significance. Some use the term “hate crime;” with the specificity of the target and the apparent links to white-supremacist beliefs, this seems to qualify as an act of terrorism.
This article seems to have what facts are known about the guy to this point. Too soon to tell but at least one person that went to school with him says he wasn’t a loner or an outcast.
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2015/06/18/everything-known-about-charleston-church-shooting-suspect-dylann-roof.html
The president just talked about it. It’s all very disturbing.
Bryan–
I read where he reloaded five times according to a survivor. How long would that take–I don’t know what kind of gun it was? I mean, would that not have been an opportunity for someone to disarm him, assuming the person wasn’t paralyzed by shock or fear?
Five times? That seems like a stretch, but I suppose it’s possible, if he shot every single victim between four and five times.
I’m making assumptions here. I’m guessing that this was the .45 that his father gave him. A Colt holds 7 or 8 rounds, not counting the extra one that can be in the chamber…
The New Yorker is my source, fwiw.http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/dylann-roof-and-a-night-of-hate-in-charleston?mbid=nl_061815_Daily&CNDID=16235625&mbid=nl_061815_Daily&CNDID=16235625&spMailingID=7837678&spUserID=ODcxMjU5MDc5NTQS1&spJobID=702312457&spReportId=NzAyMzEyNDU3S0
Reloading time depends on proficiency and type of handgun. Assuming it’s a 1911-style .45 pistol with a standard magazine, that’s seven rounds in the mag in addition to one in the pipe. Five full magazine reloads is 35 more rounds.
That is a lot of shooting.
In a non-stress situasitusituation, I can drop an empty mag, replace it with a full one, and close the slide (making the gun ready to fire again) in less than 2 seconds.
Okay, so not much time to intervene.
Not to state the obvious, but if one was in possession of a certain item, it would be enough time.
Well apparently, according to “reliable” (ahem) Facebook commenters, black churches have been encouraging their members to take CWP training, as much to defend against the robbery of the collection plate as anything else. How have we come to this?
As Rose mentioned above, this appears to be the logo that’s on Roof’s jacket in the “swamp” picture.
Thanks — wonder why is he wearing this if he graduated from White Knoll HS in Lexington?
Did he graduate from there or just attend there? He did attend some Richland one schools as well including Dreher for a short time, according to one article I saw.
Maybe he didn’t graduate high school at all and the jacket belongs to a friend or maybe the Eastover relative in the straw hat who told reporters to ‘go back where you came from’.
Could be a hand-me-down jacket, to which he affixed the flag patches….
Could be. Or maybe it is a staged photo and this is a “master’s jacket” of sorts, in an ongoing tournament of atrocities. Let it not be.
The State says he went to White Knoll in the 9th grade, based on yearbooks. Don’t know if he dropped out or they just can’t find him in any other yearbooks.
He lives off Garners Ferry now.
.45s can be reloaded in a couple of seconds
Death penalty, right?
Not as a deterrent for other killers but as punishment for a crime for which there can be no entry back into society.
Aw, I bet it would be far worse punishment to put him in with the black gangs in super max.
So killing him okay? We’re just deciding how to do it.
Oh, no–I’m thinking torture, plus fear. He’s slight of build….
Actually the death penalty is a negative deter ant. These guys seek out attention. And boy is he getting it now. A death penalty case is a grand stage for them.
Can you please list the people who chose the death penalty?
In a nation of 300million guns AND the highest murder rate in the developed world isn’t the solution obvious? We need 400 million! The NRA thinks so.
It’s not about guns, race, or flags. It’s evil. You can’t ban it.
It’s evil, combined with the easy availability of firearms.
Evil isn’t generally this deadly in, say, England.
Does that mean I have a solution? No, I don’t. I truly believe that it is an ENORMOUS problem that there are so many guns out there, to the extent that it’s way too easy for evil or insane people to get their hands on them, legally or illegally.
It’s an economic problem — too many people with murderous intent chasing too many guns.
But I have NO idea how we can fix the problem. I don’t see any practical way to address it, legally or politically.
The problem is that too many guns simply EXIST. It doesn’t matter how strict we are about keeping them out of the hands of the criminal or mentally unstable. If on Monday all the guns in the country are in the hands of law-abiding citizens, by Friday a few of them will be in the hands of the wrong people. Burglary is not that rare a crime…
So what can be done? Again, I don’t know…
A psychopath murders a bunch of defenseless, innocent people, so obviously the solution is to disarm law-abiding people.
Yep, makes total sense!
It’s a lot harder to do what he did with anything but a gun. A knife is simply not that deadly, and a bomb is riskier
It may also be a prescription drug issue. Let’s see what mind altering legal drugs he was on.
This came in about an hour ago from Hillary Clinton. I don’t have time to read it right now; just passing it on:
and then there’s this:
http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/2015/06/18/charleston_shooting_rand_paul_rick_santorum_and_other_gop_contenders_see.html?wpsrc=slatest_newsletter&sid=5388f448dd52b8e41100d5b0