Charleston Shooting

On the evening of June 17, 2015, 21-year-old Dylan Roof arrived by car in the African Methodist Episcopal Church of Emanuel, where at that moment weekly Bible studies were taking place and was present for about an hour next to the pastor. At one point, he got up from his seat with the words “I have to do this. You are raping our women and want to take over our country. You must get rid of you ” ^[1] , and then opened fire on parishioners with a Glock 41 ^[2] 45-caliber pistol ^[3] , and then disappeared ^[4] .

Around 21:05 local time ( EDT ), the city police received a signal about the shooting ^{[5] [6] [7]} . The police asked residents of nearby houses to leave the buildings, the streets adjacent to the scene were blocked, and an explosion threat was announced ^[8] .

Suspect - Dylan Storm Roof ( born Dylann Storm Roof ), born April 3, 1994 ^[4] ; CCTV camera recorded the moment when he entered the church ^[7] . Roof was detained in the city of Shelby ( North Carolina ) ^[9] , during the arrest he did not show resistance to the police ^[10] .

According to media reports, Ruf was delayed twice. In January 2015, he was arrested in a shopping center in Colombia because of his strange behavior, he was suspected of using the drug “Suboxone” and was forbidden to visit the shopping center for a year. However, already in April, he returned to the shopping center, after which the ban was extended for two years. Dylan's classmates confirmed that he used harder drugs than marijuana, in particular, the Xanax tranquilizer ^{[1] [11]} .

According to a suspect friend Dalton Tyler, Ruf was a supporter of racial segregation and said that he wanted to unleash a civil war in the United States and then commit suicide. ^[11] Uncle Rufa Carson Coles told Reuters that Dylan was very self-absorbed. At 19, he had neither a job, nor a driver’s license; most of the time he spent locked up in his room. Coles also said that a young man received a 45-caliber pistol as a gift from his father ^[3] .

The New York Times reported that Ruf has registered an Internet site containing a 2,500-word racist manifesto. The site also published pictures where the shooter poses with wax figures of slaves, weapons, the neo-Nazi slogan 14/88 ^[12] . The site domain is registered by the Russian registration service REG.RU ^[13] .

The victims of the attack were six women and three men ^[14] . Eight people died on the spot, two people were hospitalized, and later one of the victims died from wounds ^[15] . Among the dead - a member of the Senate of the US state of South Carolina , pastor Clement Pinckney ^{[5] [16]} .

Preliminary hearings in the shooting case of the church began on June 19, 2015. With respect to Rufus, charges were brought on 33 counts, including the murder motivated by racial hatred ^[17] , he was detained. The court also established bail on charges of illegal use of weapons ^[18] .

The trial of Rufus was due to begin in November, 70 days after the initial prosecution, but the court, at the request of lawyers and prosecutors, delayed the hearing three times. ^[17]

UN Secretary General Ban Ki-moon expressed his condolences to the families of the victims and called the incident a crime committed on racial grounds ^[19] .

US President Barack Obama called on citizens to rethink their views on carrying weapons ^[20] :

Let's be honest - we need to make sense of the fact that such violence does not occur in other advanced countries. <...> We know that innocent people died again partly because a person who wanted to do harm could easily take up arms.

Qualification of an event

The US Department of Justice views the incident as a terrorist act ^[21] , but the Federal Bureau of Investigation did not consider the attack on the church a terrorist attack. In a statement, FBI Director James Komi stated ^[22] :

Terrorism is an act of violence committed or declared as a threat in order to influence public authorities or citizens, that is, rather, a political act. Given that I [so far] know, I do not see this [what happened in Charleston] as a political act. However, this does not make the incident less terrible.

In one of the photos that Ruf published on his website, he posed with the flag of the Confederation , after which the public took up arms against this symbol of the army of the Confederate States of America. In a number of states, calls were made to remove the flag from public places: in Alabama , four such flags were decorated with the order of the authorities decorating the memorial to the fallen soldiers of the United States Army, Virginia Governor Terry McAulip ordered that all car numbers decorated with the Confederate symbol be replaced in the state, in Mississippi senators demanded exclude it from the state flag ^[23] .

On August 26, 2015, Virginia killed the journalists of WDBJ7, Alison Parker and Adam Ward. The killer, Lee Wester Flanagan, who later committed suicide, sent a 23-page manifest by fax to the ABC News television station several hours before committing the crime, informing him that his act was a reaction to what happened in Charleston ^[24] .

• US terrorism