Shelby, NC – The police chief in Charleston says the white man suspected of killing nine people inside a historic black church has been captured in North Carolina.
Chief Greg Mullen says 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof was arrested Thursday during a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina.
The 21-year-old white gunman with a criminal record killed nine people at a Bible-study meeting in a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, in an attack U.S. officials are investigating as a hate crime.
A man who identified himself as Roof’s uncle said he had recently been give a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present by his father and that the 21-year-old had seemed adrift.
“The more I look at him, the more I’m convinced, that’s him,” Carson Cowles, 56, told Reuters in a phone interview, adding that law enforcement agents were present at Roof’s home.
“If it is him, and when they catch him, he’s got to pay for this.”
The victims, six females and three males, included Reverend Clementa Pinckney, who was the church’s pastor and a Democratic member of the state Senate, according to colleagues.
