US Attorney General Loretta Lynch announced on Wednesday that the gunman who killed nine people at a South Carolina church last month would be charged under federal hate crime legislation.
The suspect, 21-year-old Dylann Roof, plotted his attack for months and chose his target because it was a nationally known historically black church, Lynch said.
Roof is also accused of killing people while obstructing religious freedom, a charge that carries a possible death sentence, though Lynch said the US Department of Justice had not decided whether to seek it.
“He was looking for the type of church and the type of parishioners whose death would in fact draw great notoriety for his racist views,” Lynch said.
Authorities have linked Roof to a racist Internet manifesto and said he was in contact with white supremacist groups before his attack on the well-known Emanuel AME Church, which has hosted many major civil rights leaders.
Roof already faces nine counts of murder in state court and could face the death penalty there. However, Justice Department and FBI officials have said the Charleston shooting was so horrific and racially motivated that the federal government must address it.
South Carolina does not have a hate crime law, and federal officials have said they believe that a murder case alone would leave the racial component of the crime unaddressed.
“The parishioners had Bibles,” Lynch said. “Dylann Roof had his .45-caliber Glock pistol and eight magazines loaded with hollow-point bullets.”
Lynch did not say whether prosecutors would try to bring the federal case to trial before the state trial, or whether they would wait to see the result of the local case.
The state prosecutor’s office did not respond to a message seeking comment.
Lynch said Roof hoped the attack would “fan racial flames” and exact revenge for what he believed were wrongs that black Americans committed against white people.
Before the shooting, he was photographed holding a Confederate battle flag and a handgun.
“I have no choice,” his manifesto read. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is [the] most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the Internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
Survivors said Roof arrived at the church as worshipers gathered for a Wednesday night Bible study group, and sat with them for a while before he started shooting.
“You are raping our women and taking over our country,” Roof said to the victims, all of them black, before killing them, witnesses told the police.
While the shooting did bring new national attention to racial tensions, it did not have the effect that prosecutors say Roof wanted. Instead, the shooting renewed the national debate over the symbolism of the Confederate flag. South Carolina lawmakers responded by removing the flag from the State House grounds.
There are mixed views inside the Justice Department about whether prosecutors should try to bring the federal case before Roof stands trial in South Carolina.
Some said they believed it would be better to defer to local prosecutors, both because they have already started a case that they see as very strong, and because it avoids the lengthy federal process required when seeking the death penalty.
Others said the shooting is precisely the kind of crime Congress intended the federal government to prosecute when it enacted hate crime laws.
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