Man accused of church killings spoke of attacking college

[Judi Lynn]

Source: Associated Press

Man accused of church killings spoke of attacking college
By MITCH WEISS and MICHAEL BIESECKER, Associated Press | June 19, 2015 | Updated: June 20, 2015 1:22am

COLUMBIA, S.C. (AP) — A black drinking buddy of the white man accused of killing nine people at a Charleston church says the suspect told him a week earlier that he planned to shoot up a college campus in the city.

The friend, Christon Scriven, told The Associated Press on Friday that he thought Dylann Roof's statements were just drunken bluster. Still, Scriven said he was concerned enough that he and another friend, Joey Meek, went out to Roof's car and retrieved his .45-caliber handgun, hiding it in an air-conditioning vent of a mobile home until they all sobered up.

"He just said he was going to hurt a bunch of people" at the College of Charleston, said Scriven, 22.

"I said, 'What did you say? Why do you want to hurt those people in Charleston?'"


Read more: http://www.chron.com/news/crime/article/Church-shooting-suspect-previously-arrested-on-6337776.php

[Novara]

1. The picture that's forming....

....is a high school dropout loser with no job, nothing to do but drink and bitch that he's a loser. But instead of taking action he blames blacks. If he wants to shoot up a college, he sees successful smart people and instead of looking within himself to figure out why he isn't one of them, he only thinks he's entitled to what they have/are, so he lashes out.

It's the same old story. It seems that every shooter is blaming others for his inability to succeed in one way or another.

[Archae]

9. Hit it right on the head.

I remember that guy in Texas who shot up a cafeteria, mostly shooting women there.

He was another loser, thought he was God's gift to women but they wanted nothing to do with him.

[Igel]

10. I know a lot of people like that.

Some we say show a lack of responsibility and initiative, and want others to help them make up for missed opportunities. They didn't take advantage of school and other chances in life and feel entitled to a better life. He failed to introspect sufficiently and find that the causes for his unemployment and downtrodden state lie within himself (I'd say he introspected too much, a bit too trait ruminant, but that's just my humble opinion).

Others we don't, or even justify--others were privileged, it's all unfair, they didn't really have opportunities, they were unlucky or didn't have the right connections or the right family. Depends if we feel solidarity with them or not, for the most part.

Both are pretty much always true in part.

[elleng]

17. Related to this, maybe:

The cost of letting young people drift.

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/the-cost-of-letting-young-people-drift.html?

[Chasstev365]

2. Why didn't they contact the police?

People are claiming they had knowledge of the man's intentions, yet no one went to the authorities? Profiles in cowardice!

[surrealAmerican]

3. If I had to guess, I'd say it was because ...

... he was always saying things like this, and had never killed anybody yet. His drinking buddies were conditioned to ignore his threats as drunken bluster.

[Yo_Mama]

5. Because they did not see the picture we are seeing - of malignant, hateful racism

The speaker in this article was a black friend or acquaintance of Roof's.

What we see on Facebook is what these people are telling us about him - in his own life, Roof did not appear to display animus against black people. They did not think he was capable of doing this.

I am in my fifties. When I was in fourth grade, my teacher said the following in a lesson about WWII history:
That we should read Mein Kampf when we got older. That book was everywhere, but no one believed that Hitler, if allowed to take and retain power, would attempt to do the things written in there, because it was too completely crazy. She told us quite seriously that before leaving high school we should read the book and think very carefully about what happened, and that this would happen again because people who are this off are not believed, and that in our own lives, when we encountered something like this, we should believe and take action, and she warned us that if we did not, many lives would be lost.

[Igel]

7. Hindsight is great.

The trick is having it before something happens.

[hedda_foil]

13. At least they hid his gun.

[Human101948]

4. Was it a Christian college?

If not it puts the kibosh on the Fox News talking point.

[starroute]

6. it's a public university

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/College_of_Charleston

The College of Charleston (also known as CofC, The College, or in athletics, Charleston) is a public, sea-grant and space-grant university located in historic downtown Charleston, South Carolina, United States. The college was founded in 1770 and chartered in 1785, making it the oldest college or university in South Carolina, the 15th oldest institution of higher learning in the United States and the oldest municipal college in the country. The founders of the College include three future signers of the Declaration of Independence (Edward Rutledge, Arthur Middleton and Thomas Heyward) and three future signers[4] of the United States Constitution (John Rutledge, Charles Pinckney and Charles Cotesworth Pinckney).

[NJCher]

8. as a college teacher, this is what made chills run down my spine

"I don't think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school," Scriven said Friday. "But I think he couldn't get into the school because of the security ... so I think he just settled for the church."

Recently I attended a Board of Trustees meeting at the college where I teach. After the meeting, I commented, with disgust, to my colleagues on the executive board of our union, about how the Board rubberstamped the Dept. of Homeland Security's offer to install cameras in all the hallways. I viewed it as another intrusion into our privacy.

Was I ever wrong, as the above paragraph that I quoted shows.

To me, it is just unfathomable to go to a place like a church and kill people. Nothing is off-limits to these severely messed up individuals. Now that we have the schools covered (or are at least on our way), instead of killing children, they'll just kill church-goers.




Cher

[Kelvin Mace]

18. The cameras are still an invasion of privacy

And they offer a false sense of security. Generally, video cameras are only helpful after people are dead in finding the killer, as was the case in this shooting. If they have ever stopped a shooting I haven't heard about it any story I have read over the years.

[NJCher]

19. what about this circumstance

What if there are several of them or a group, going from room to room shooting? Don't you think a view of all the hallways would be helpful?


Cher

[Kelvin Mace]

20. Of the dozens of mass shooting since Columbine

only a few involved more than the one shooter. More cameras mean more screens to watch, and while cameras are cheap, the people to watch them are expensive and therefore won't be hired. Cameras are like car alarms, almost everyone has been ne, so everyone ignores them when they go off.

Again, cameras invade privacy while providing false security.

[LiberalElite]

11. Unfortunately we don't all have the same capacity to

be introspective, and curb impulses.

[ronnie624]

12. "I don't think his parents liked his decisions,

the choices that he made to have black friends," Scriven recounted.

[mnhtnbb]

14. So. Finally we're getting the family story. Divorced parents. Sister about to be married.

He's not getting the attention he wants.

You can imagine ALL the attention has been focused on the sister's wedding.
He's arrested 3 miles from the house of the sister's fiance. What made him go there?
Was he about to go kill someone else?

This is a very screwed up kid looking around to blame everyone and everything for the reason
he's a loser.

And what does he get for his birthday? A gun.

What a disaster. Absolute disaster.

[smirkymonkey]

15. +1000

What a pathetic little punk.

[lunasun]

21. and this about his parents

""I don't think his parents liked his decisions, the choices that he made to have black friends," Scriven recounted.

"His mom had taken the gun from him and somehow he went back and took it from her. ... That's when we saw the gun for the first time: .45 with a high-point laser beam."

[Gormy Cuss]

16. Thank goodness, now Fox can talk about this lone wolf

who wasn't motivated by racism at all.

[Recursion]

22. This certainly feeds that line, talking to a black drinking buddy about shooting up a white college

Makes me wonder how reliable this is.