ABSTRACT
ON THE EVENING of Wednesday, June 17,2015, Dylann Roof, a 21-year-old unemployed white man, walked through the front door of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Columbia, South Carolina, during a Bible study session, and took a seat near the back of the church. He sat there for nearly an hour then walked toward the congregation and opened fire with a Glock 41 handgun. Eight parishioners died at the scene,
including the pastor, Clementa Pinkney, a state senator in the South Carolina legislation; another church member later died of her wounds. In the midst of his shooting rampage, one of the con gregants told him, “You don’t have to do this.” His reply was, “I have to do it. You are raping our women and taking over our country.” When the oldest person there, an 87-year-old woman, said that the shooter could kill her and not the younger
woman he was aiming at, he replied, “It doesn’t matter. I am going to shoot all of you.” The next day, Roof was arrested in a routine traffic stop; at his interrogation, he confessed to his crimes (Corasaniti, Pena, and Alvarez, 2015).
