Man accused of church killings spoke of attacking college
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
(5,877 posts)....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
(46,379 posts)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
(35,393 posts)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
(131,457 posts)The cost of letting young people drift.
http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/21/opinion/the-cost-of-letting-young-people-drift.html?
Chasstev365
(5,191 posts)People are claiming they had knowledge of the man's intentions, yet no one went to the authorities? Profiles in cowardice!
surrealAmerican
(11,370 posts)... 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
(8,303 posts)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
(35,393 posts)The trick is having it before something happens.
hedda_foil
(16,379 posts)Human101948
(3,457 posts)If not it puts the kibosh on the Fox News talking point.
starroute
(12,977 posts)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
(35,842 posts)"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
(17,469 posts)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
(35,842 posts)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
(17,469 posts)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
(14,691 posts)be introspective, and curb impulses.
ronnie624
(5,764 posts)the choices that he made to have black friends," Scriven recounted.
mnhtnbb
(31,428 posts)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
(63,221 posts)What a pathetic little punk.
lunasun
(21,646 posts)""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
(30,884 posts)who wasn't motivated by racism at all.
Recursion
(56,582 posts)Makes me wonder how reliable this is.