They Welcomed Him to Pray. Then He Opened Fire: Remembering the Charleston Church Massacre, 10 Years Later
Ten years ago, on June 17, 2015, a white supremacist walked into a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, joined a Bible study group that had met that night, and shortly after, opened fire and killed nine of its members in cold blood.
The shooter, Dylann Roof, then 22, sat in the Bible study group with his victims for about an hour in the basement of the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church, the oldest one in the south, before he drew a gun and shot church members while they were praying, federal prosecutors said.
Related: Charleston Hate-Crime Suspect Dylann Storm Roof in Custody After Killing Spree at Historic Black Church
'In that moment, a man of immense hatred walked into that room shooting person after person after person, stopping only so he could reload more magazines and kill more people,' assistant U.S. Attorney Nathan Williams said in a release in 2017.
On Dec. 15, 2016, a jury convicted Roof of 33 counts of federal hate crimes, obstruction of religious exercise, and firearms charges, for killing and attempting to kill African-American worshipers at the church, also known as 'Mother Emanuel,' according to the U.S. Attorney's Office in the District of South Carolina.
Related: Dylann Roof Sentenced to Death for Killing 9 Black People in Charleston Church
Roof was sentenced to death on Jan. 11, 2017 by the same jury who convicted him. He remains on death row.
Survivors had to mourn the loss of friends and family who were murdered and learn to pick up the pieces of their lives in the aftermath.
Malana Pinckney, 16, survived the shooting. But her father, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, 41, was murdered that night.
Her mother, Jennifer Pinckey, told NBC's Today show that she credits Malana for saving her life.
Knowing her lively 6-year-old daughter might disrupt the Bible study, Jennifer took Malana into the church office, she told Today.
'By her coming and being with us, [it] kept me in the office,' Jennifer Pinckney told Today. 'Because I knew, six years old, she was not going to sit in a Bible study. She was just going to be running around and wanting to talk, or wanting to eat a snack or something. So I knew it was best, 'We're going to say in the pastor's study.' And that's why I'm here today, is because of her.'
Jennifer Pinckney told Today that she, Malana and her oldest daughter, Eliana, 21, think of her husband and their father every single day.
"This year there were a lot of milestones," said Jennifer Pinckney. "Malana went to the prom, Eliana graduated from college. It's just been like, 'Your father should've been here to witness and to be a part of all of this that's going on.'"Eliana Pinckney graduated from Philadelphia's Temple University in May.
"It gets a little easy to forget sometimes that I'm 21 and that my dad died when I was 11," she told CBS News.
Then-President Barack Obama delivered Rev. Pinckney's eulogy.
"I can distinctly remember at 11, knowing the magnitude President Obama held," she said.
The other victims who lost their lives that day were Cynthia Hurd, 54; the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; Depayne Middleton Doctor, 49; The Rev. Daniel Simmons, 74; and Myra Thompson, 59.
Rather than tear the community apart, the murders brought the community closer together, U.S. Attorney Beth Drake said in 2017.
'Motivated by racist hatred, Dylann Roof murdered and attempted to murder innocent African-American parishioners as they worshiped in the historic Mother Emanuel church,' Drake said in the Jan. 2017 release.
'But, contrary to Roof's desire to sow the seeds of hate, his acts did not tear this community apart. Instead of agitating racial tensions as he had hoped, Roof's deadly attack inside Mother Emanuel became an attack on all of us, and the community stood in solidarity.'
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