Where It Happened: Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal
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A white gunman opened
fire at a prayer meeting inside the church after 8 p.m. on Wednesday, killing
nine, including the pastor. He had sat with parishioners for nearly an hour
before opening fire.
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| Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church who was also a state senator, the group included a girls’ track coach, a recent college graduate, a librarian, a university admissions coordinator and others devoted to churches in the area. |
Mr. Pinckney was holding a Bible study session with a
small group on Wednesday when, surveillance video shows, the suspect arrived
after 8 p.m. — a slight, blond man with a bowl haircut and a gray sweatshirt.
He sat down with the others for a while and listened, then began to disagree
with others as they spoke about Scripture, said Kristen Washington, who heard
the harrowing story from her family members who were at the meeting and
survived.
Witnesses to the killings said the gunman asked for the
pastor when he entered the church, and sat next to Mr. Pinckney during the
Bible study.
They said that almost an hour after he arrived, the gunman
suddenly stood and pulled a gun, and Ms. Washington’s cousin Tywanza Sanders,
26, known as the peacemaker of the family, tried to calmly talk the man out of
violence.
“You don’t have to do this,” he told the gunman, Ms.
Washington recounted.
The gunman replied, “Yes. You are
raping our women and taking over the country.”
The gunman took aim at the oldest person present,
Susie Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, Ms. Washington said. Mr. Sanders told
the man to point the gun at him instead, she said, but the man said, “It
doesn’t matter. I’m going to shoot all of you.”
Mr. Sanders dived in front of his aunt and the first shot
struck him, Ms. Washington said, and then the gunman began shooting others. She
said Mr. Sanders’s mother, Felicia, and his niece, lay motionless on the floor,
playing dead, and were not shot.
The gunman looked at one woman and told her “that she was
going to live so that she can tell the story of what happened,” said City
Councilman William Dudley Gregorie, a friend of the woman and a trustee of the
church.
“She is still in shock, the carnage was just unbelievable
is my understanding,” he said. “One of the younger kids in the church literally
had to play dead, and it’s my understanding that my friend might have also laid
down on top of him to protect him as well.”
The gunman left six women and three
men dead or dying, including a library manager, a former county administrator,
a speech therapist who also worked for the church, and two ministers. Greg
Mullen, the Charleston police chief, called it a hate crime, and Attorney
General Loretta E. Lynch said the Justice Department was investigating that
possibility.
The tragedy had a particular resonance in a city that
offers perhaps the sharpest contrast in the South between its cosmopolitan,
tolerant present and its antebellum past, when Charleston was the capital of
the slave trade. It was in Charleston that a state convention adopted the
“ordinance of secession” in December 1860, putting South Carolina on a path to
become the first state to leave the Union, and the first shots of the Civil War
were fired four months later at Fort Sumter.
The shooting reignited demands that
the South Carolina Legislature end its practice of flying the Confederate
battle flag on the grounds of the state Capitol in Columbia.
But if the church shooting prompted comparisons to the
1963 bombing of a black church in Birmingham by white supremacists that killed
four girls, it also illustrated how much has changed. The earlier bombing took
place as black people struggled to secure basic civil rights, at a time when
many were barred from voting, much less holding office. Alabama’s governor at
the time, George C. Wallace, was the public face of white resistance, and no
one was charged with the crime until 12 years later.
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When Tywanza Sanders, the poet and peacemaker of the
family, saw the man draw his gun during Bible study and point it as his elderly
aunt, Susie Jackson, he shielded her and tried to talk the gunman into laying
down his weapon, a relative said Thursday.
“That was who he was,” said Kristen Washington, a relative
who recounted what she heard from witnesses to the shooting.
Instead, the gunman killed Mr. Sanders, and then gunned
down his aunt and seven other churchgoers who had driven to the church on a
Wednesday night for one reason: to discuss Scripture, and how to make Jesus’
actions come alive in their own lives and communities.
The nine victims — three men and six
women, who ranged in age from 26 to 87 — were leaders, motivators, counselors
and the people everyone could turn to for a heap of prayer, friends and
relatives said. Led by the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, the pastor of Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church who was also a state senator, the group
included a girls’ track coach, a recent college graduate, a librarian, a
university admissions coordinator and others devoted to churches in the area.
Mr. Sanders, 26, had graduated from Allen University
last year and worked full-time as a barber to pay his bills. He was proud of
his degree in business administration from Allen, a historically black college,
but he wanted more. He told Torrence Shaw, a friend, that he wanted to go to
graduate school to pursue music production. Mr. Sanders had been researching
scholarships.
But it was his personality, even more than his ambition
that left an impression on his friends and family.
“For him being so young, he was wise,” Mr. Shaw said. “He
was always caring and would give the shirt off his back to anybody. He was the
first person I would always call to get his wisdom and advice.”
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The shooting Wednesday took the life of a black state
legislator, an arrest was made in hours, and some of the most emotional
expressions of mourning came from Ms. Haley, whose parents are from India and
who is the state’s first female governor and the first not of European descent.
Ms.
Jackson, 87, Mr. Sanders’s aunt, was a longtime Emanuel churchgoer in a
spiritually rooted family that considered churchgoing as nonnegotiable.
Myra
Thompson, 59, had traveled over from Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal
Church, the church where her husband, the Rev. Anthony Thompson, serves
as vicar, to join the study group.
The
Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, had made a similar journey. He was a
retired pastor from another church but would regularly stop by Emanuel,
according to his daughter-in-law, Arcelia Simmons of Newport News, Va.
Mr. Simmons was the only victim to die at the hospital.
“Many
people are struggling with this right now, and we think it’s a time to
start the healing process,” Mr. Huskey, the principal, said.
“We’re
in a society today that is broken, pretty much,” he added. “And there
will be a time when those times will be made right.”
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DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a
minister who loved to sing, had retired from county government as head of the
Community Development Block Grant Program in 2005. Last year, she joined her
former school, Southern Wesleyan University, as the admissions coordinator. Ms.
Middleton-Doctor had gotten a master’s degree in management from there.
The Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who
was a state senator. Credit Sam Holland/South Carolina Senate, via Reuters
“DePayne truly believed in the
mission of S.W.U. to help students achieve their potential by connecting faith
with learning,” said the university’s president, Tom Voss.
The Charleston City Council
chairman, Elliott Summey, said as a county worker Ms. Middleton-Doctor, who had
four daughters in junior high through college, tended to the needs of
underprivileged communities. “In a very big way, she was doing very human,
kindly things,” he said.
Like others attending the Bible
study, Ethel Lee Lance, 70, was dedicated to Emanuel. She was a sexton at the
church and had worked there for three decades, her grandson told The Post and
Courier of Charleston, S.C.
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Cynthia Hurd, 54, lived amid books. A librarian for 31
years for the Charleston County library system, Ms. Hurd once said in an
interview with a local newspaper that she loved finding answers, like a
detective. But it was working with people that she loved most about her job,
she told the paper. She named Maya Angelou as her favorite author.
The Charleston City Council announced Thursday that it
would rename the St. Andrews library branch in her honor.
“It is unimaginable that she would
walk into a church and not return,” Ms. Hurd’s brother, Malcolm Graham, a
former state senator, said in a statement. “But that’s who she was — a woman of
faith.”
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