Details emerge in Emanuel AME shooting

CHARLESTON, S.C. (WCIV) — 538 images. 362 pages of case documents. That’s how much information was released Thursday morning by court officials after months of debate over an open-ended gag order in the Dylann Roof mass murder case. After a number of hearings and a private meeting between attorneys involved in the case and the judge, the massive release of case information is largely redacted. The photos, as was expected, show none of the details from the scene to protect the victims. But the information on who was interviewed by members of Charleston police, state police, and FBI, and what they said is largely lacking. A CAD report that’s generated for every incident involving police shows more than four dozen officers were dispatched to the church and the downtown area to search for Dylann Roof within minutes of the shooting. The CAD report also shows that the first call for help came at 9:05 p.m. as the shooting was happening. “People shot down here. Shot pastor. Man is still here. Lower level. Shooter in office,” the dispatcher notes. “Young white male. Make is reloading.” Six minutes later, the man in the gray shirt and jeans with sandy blonde hair had left the church. He had left two people alive inside Rev. Clementa Pinckney’s office, who were able to call for help. The woman, Pinckney’s wife, said she could hear people outside the office door calling for help. When police had secured the area, eight were dead and one more victim was dying, taken to Medical University Hospital for life-saving efforts that would ultimately not work. In the ensuing minutes and hours after the shooting but before they had a chance to look at the surveillance footage from Emanuel AME Church, police would receive a number of calls from residents and other officers who spotted someone suspicious in the area. There was the man who lived on King Street who espoused racist views, one caller said. There was the man in Marion Square. There was a man seen walking on Charlotte Street away from the church. There was the man at Parkwood Estates wearing a gray sweatshirt. There was the man in the parking garage near the visitor’s center. But Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old man from Columbia who ended up being the primary suspect in the case, left the church in a black Hyundai sedan shortly after the shooting, turning on Henrietta Street heading toward Meeting Street and the interstate, according to written accounts of the surveillance footage. Roof, of course, was picked up in the town of Shelby, North Carolina, after a woman called police saying she had seen a similar car driven by a young white man on Highway 74 west. When officers stopped Roof, he complied with their orders, putting his hands on top of the steering wheel and then turning the car off. He voluntarily told officers of the .45-caliber Glock semiautomatic handgun under a pillow in his back seat. It was 10:32 a.m. on June 18. Officers asked Roof if he had any identification, and he said he did. He also told officers he was coming from Charleston, South Carolina. “I asked him if he was involved in (the) incident down there and he stated ‘yes,'” the officer notes in his report. Another officer with the Shelby Police Department obtained a warrant to search Roof and take his photos. Shortly before 5 p.m., the officer took eight photos of Roof’s head and body, and then collected a gunshot resident kit and DNA swab, as well as his clothes. The pieces of evidence the officer collected, however, are redacted in the report released Thursday. Around 6 p.m., Shelby police transferred custody of Roof to Charleston police and the State Law Enforcement Division, who then passed him off to Charleston County deputies to be taken to the Sheriff Al Cannon Detention Center in North Charleston. It had been 22 hours since the shooting happened. Hours before Shelby police stopped Roof, Richland County deputies were visiting an Eastover home where Roof had been staying. Deputies met with two people whose names were redacted, but through subsequent reports on the case are known to be Joey Meek and Lindsey Fry. Six pages of evidence were logged at the home, but everything has been redacted in the chain of custody report. An interview log provided in the SLED report reveals some details of the interaction between Meek, Fry, and investigators from SLED, U.S. Marshals, and Richland County deputies. During the conversation with Fry and Meek, one of them said “He only comes here on weekends and every now and then. He comes here to do laundry.” Roof did not pay rent, they said. In a room where he slept, officers found something, but what that item was has been redacted. There were other items in the back yard. Meek was later charged with misprision in connection to the case. He recently had his bond reduced to $25,000 and was told he had to stay with his grandparents and avoid all contact with his friends once he bonded out of jail. SLED investigators traced Roof’s fun back to Shooter’s Choice gun store in West Columbia, where the shop’s owners provided two days of video surveillance showing Roof visiting the store and buying the gun. Roof started the paperwork process on April 11, 2015, and finished it five days later, the report shows. SLED also has a 396-item, 26-page listing of evidence collected in the case. All of it has been redacted. In fact, 138 pages of the 161-page SLED report are completely redacted. Ten of those not redacted are just a list of the victims’ names. Others are blank or a vague property receipt between SLED agents. Even the search of Roof’s car, that was taken to SLED headquarters for evidence after he was arrested in Shelby, is redacted. SLED agents logged 36 items in the car during the evidence search. Crime scene photos of the car show some of those items on the redacted list may be a rearview mirror air freshener, a pillow, a towel, assorted clothes, a book bag, a pizza box, a bottle of water, and an open bag of Doritos. Jay Bender, the attorney for ABC News 4, the Post and Courier, and the Associated Press, who have pushed for records release in the case, said Judge JC Nicholson said police would not be forced to release graphic photos from the crime scene or audio of the 911 calls. However, he says that’s not what happened on Thursday with the release of documents. “What the police seem to be doing here is to develop a blanket exemption for other material,” he told the Post and Courier’s Executive Editor Mitch Pugh. Photos courtesy of WCIV