Charleston church shooting

A U.S. jury on Jan. 10 condemned self-described white supremacist Dylann Roof to death over the massacre of nine black worshippers in a South Carolina church in June 2015 - a crime that shocked the nation.

A U.S. judge on Jan. 2 ruled Dylann Roof was mentally fit to serve as his own lawyer in the penalty phase of his trial, when a jury will decide whether to sentence him to be executed for the 2015 massacre at a South Carolina church. 

The divisive Confederate flag came down on July 10 at South Carolina's legislature, drawing a line under a furor rekindled last month by the murder of nine black churchgoers by a young white supremacist.

Walmart and Amazon will no longer stock merchandise bearing the Confederate flag after the Charleston church massacre, in a growing movement against what critics say is a symbol of racism in the American South.

A chilling website apparently created by Dylann Roof emerged June 20 in which the accused Charleston church shooter rails against African Americans and appears in photographs with guns and burning the US flag.

The 21 year-old Charleston killer Dylann Roof who confessed to killing nine African-Americans in a church of Charleston, South Carolina was apparently originally planning to assault a college.

NBC News and the Washington Post claim that Roof told an African-American neighbor of his recently, on a night when they were out drinking, that he wanted to shoot up a school.

Police captured the white suspect June 18 in a gun massacre at one of the oldest black churches in the United States, the latest deadly assault to feed simmering racial tensions.

A white gunman killed nine people at a historic African-American church in Charleston, South Carolina, the city's police chief said on June 18, describing the attack as a "hate crime". 

The suspect, who police described as a 21-year-old white man wearing a sweatshirt, jeans and boots, was still at large hours after the shooting on June 17 evening. 

Nine people were confirmed dead after a shooting at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal shooting in Charleston, South Carolina, on Wednesday. Police said several bodies were in the church that were now being identified. Among the dead was the state senator who was pastor of the church, Democrat Clementa Pinckney.