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Local AME congregation holds prayer service for victims of Charleston church shooting

CHARLESTON, S.C. — A white man who joined a prayer meeting inside a historic black church and then fatally shot nine people was captured without resistance Thursday after an all-night manhunt, Charleston's police chief said.

Dylann Storm Roof, 21, spent nearly an hour inside the church Wednesday night before killing six women and three men, including the pastor, Chief Greg Mullen said. A citizen spotted his car in Shelby, North Carolina, nearly four hours away.

Members of Saint James AME Church in Pittsburgh gathered Thursday evening to pray for the victims and reflect on the senselessness of it all.

“For all places for him to go to, he went to that special place,” said Saint James AME Church Rev. Maureen Cross Bolden. “They were there for prayer. The reasons they should've been.”

For Saint James Pastor Rodrecus Johnson Jr., whose family comes from Charleston, the situation has been especially tough. His family knows at least one of the victims and is now heading to South Carolina to offer whatever support they can to Pastor Clementa Pinckney’s family.

“The reality is that was my brother, not only my frat brother but my brother. So I’m going to go down to support the family and everyone,” said Johnson.

Saint James AME Church is currently collecting donations to bring to the victims’ families when Johnson heads to Charleston next week.

Channel 11 News caught up with three women from the Pittsburgh area who were caught in the middle of all this Wednesday night.

The Daley sisters told Channel 11’s Brandon Hudson that they were vacationing a couple doors down from the church where nine people were killed.

“There were probably about 50 police officers in the area we were walking through,” Megan Daley said.

The women said they didn’t get much sleep because of a police-enforced lockdown kept them away from where they were staying. There were forced to stay at a nearby firehall.

“Throughout the night we just heard police officers turning over garbage cans and searching the streets,” Megan Daley said.

They said the lockdown ended around 5 a.m.

“It was surreal. Honestly, I can’t imagine how close we were,” Nicole Daley said.

The sisters said they talked with people from Charleston.

“They were all really distraught -- like, all the locals, that this was even happening at all,” Daley said.

The sisters went to Myrtle Beach Thursday, but it wasn’t without some tense moments knowing the shooter was still on the run for part of the day.

Meanwhile, the police chief wouldn't discuss a motive. Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. called it "pure, pure concentrated evil." Stunned community leaders and politicians condemned the attack on The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the Justice Department has begun a hate crime investigation.

President Barack Obama, who personally knew the slain pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, said these shootings have to stop.

"At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries," Obama said.

Pinckney, 41, was a married father of two who spent 19 years in the South Carolina legislature. He became the youngest member of the House when he was first elected as a Democrat at 23.

"He had a core not many of us have," said Sen. Vincent Sheheen, who sat beside Pinckney in the Senate. "I think of the irony that the most gentle of the 46 of us — the best of the 46 of us in this chamber — is the one who lost his life."

The other victims were identified as Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Sharonda Singleton, 45; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74; and DePayne Doctor.

Sanders had recently graduated from Allen University. Hurd worked for Charleston County's library system for 31 years. Doctor was an enrollment counselor at Southern Wesleyan University's Charleston Campus, according to a friend.

Charleston County Coroner Rae Wooten said autopsies would be conducted over the next several days and did not have specific information on how many times the victims were shot or the locations of their injuries.

Roof's childhood friend, Joey Meek, alerted the FBI after recognizing him in a surveillance camera image, said Meek's mother, Kimberly Konzny. Roof had worn the same sweatshirt while playing Xbox videogames in their home recently.

"I don't know what was going through his head," Konzny said. "He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends."

Roof had been to jail: State court records show a pending felony drug case and a past misdemeanor trespassing charge.

He also displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes: a Confederate flag was on his license plate, Konzny said, and a photo on his Facebook page shows him wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from Rhodesia and apartheid-era South Africa.

Roof wasn't known to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Ala., and it's not clear whether he had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina, but he appears to be a "disaffected white supremacist," based on his Facebook page, said the center's president, Richard Cohen.

The shooting evoked painful memories of other attacks. Black churches were bombed in the 1960s when they served as organizing hubs for the Civil Rights movement, and burned by arsons across the South in the 1990s. Others survived shooting sprees.

This particular congregation, which formed in 1816, has its own grim history: A founder, Denmark Vesey, was hanged after trying to organize a slave revolt in 1822, and white landowners burned the church in revenge, leaving parishioners to worship underground until after the Civil War.

This shooting "should be a warning to us all that we do have a problem in our society," said state Rep. Wendell Gilliard, a Democrat whose district includes the church. "There's a race problem in our country. There's a gun problem in our country. We need to act on them quickly."

"Of all cities, in Charleston, to have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained," Riley said. "We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family."

NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said "there is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people."

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A few bouquets of flowers tied to a police barricade outside the church formed a small but growing memorial.

"Today I feel like it's 9-11 again," Bob Dyer, who works in the area, said after leaving an arrangement of yellow flowers wrapped in plastic. "I'm in shock."

The attack came two months after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by a white police officer in neighboring North Charleston, which increased racial tensions. The officer awaits trial for murder, and the shooting prompted South Carolina to pass a law, co-sponsored by Pinckney, to equip police statewide with body cameras.

The Associated Press contributed to this report.

WPXI

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