With the arrest of Dylann Storm Roof, Charleston police have interrogated the young man, and he has confessed to the reasons for the church shooting. It turns out that Roof is hoping to promote a race war in the United States with his attack, and his friends claimed he was obsessed with Trayvon Martin, Freddie Gray, the Baltimore riots, and everything associated with the Black Lives Matter group.
In a related report by the Inquisitr , in the wake of the Charleston shooting , there have been allegations of “white privilege” by some. The identity of the person who helped catch Dylann Roof has also been revealed.
After the Friday bail hearing for Dylann Storm Roof, Charleston officials will continue their investigation. Charleston Police spokesman Charles Francis declined to comment on the reports of a confession, but CNN cited an unnamed law enforcement official who claims that Roof confessed to shooting nine black people, including multiple ministers and a Democratic state senator, at the nearly 200-year-old Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
U.S. officials desire to prosecute the Charleston shooting as a hate crime, but South Carolina’s laws do not have any stipulations for hate crime laws, which imposes additional penalties on crimes committed because of a victim’s race. But South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley claims this case is definitely a hate crime.
“This is an absolute hate crime ,” Haley said, according to Reuters . “We’ve been talking with the investigators because we’ve been going through the interviews, they said they looked pure evil in the eye.”
During the Charleston shooting, Roof allegedly told a survivor that he was killing black people because “[y]ou rape our women and are taking over our country.”
A friend of Dylann Storm Roof told the New York Daily News that he admitted to the Charleston shooting in advance by making jokes about killing “a bunch of people on Wednesday.”
“He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff,” Christian Scriven claims.
Another friend, Joseph Meek, tried to hide Roof’s gun after Dylann went on a drunken, bigoted rant about segregation and killing people. Roof allegedly said that black people were taking over the world and claimed he needed to do something for the white race.
“He said he was planning for about six months to do something crazy,” said Meek. “He wanted it to be segregated. He wanted it to be white with the white, black with the black. All the races segregated. He wanted to do something big, like the Trayvon Martin case. He was upset about it. It made him mad.”
Based upon the charges against Dylann Storm Roof , Charleston officials may seek the death penalty.
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