On this
date, June 17, 2015, Nine people are killed in a mass shooting at Emanuel
African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston,
South Carolina.
 |
Nine victims of the
Charleston church shooting. Top row: Cynthia Hurd, Rev. Clementa Pinckney, Rev.
Sharonda Coleman-Singleton Middle row: Daniel Simmons, Rev. Depayne Middleton
Doctor, Tywanza Sanders Bottom row: Myra Thompson, Ethel Lee Lance, Susie
Jackson
Via Facebook and Getty Images
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.nbcnews.com/storyline/charleston-church-shooting/charleston-church-shooting-tributes-paid-kind-hearted-victims-n377551]
|
INTERNET
SOURCE: http://www.wsbtv.com/news/church-slaying-families-accept-pursuit-of-death-penalty/302735731
Church
slaying families accept push for death penalty
Wednesday, May 25, 2016
COLUMBIA, S.C. — The husband of a
woman gunned down at a historic black church in Charleston with eight other
people said last week that he would not be at peace until the man charged in
the slayings was put to death.
Arthur Hurd, whose wife, Cynthia, was
among those killed June 17 during Bible study, is one of several family members
of victims who want to see Dylann Roof die if he is convicted.
“What would give me full
closure would be if I were the one who pushed the plunger on the lethal
injection, or if I were the one to pull the switch on the electric chair or if
I was the one to open the valve on the gas chamber,” he said on Wednesday. “[When] Roof’s body is cold, sleeping in the ground — that’s
closure.”
Federal prosecutors announced Tuesday
that they were seeking the death penalty against Roof, who is facing hate
crimes and other charges. He is also facing a death penalty trial in state
court, which is scheduled for next year. No date has been set for the federal
trial.
The killings reignited discussions
about race relations and led to the removal of a Confederate battle flag from
the South Carolina Statehouse. Roof, who is white, had previously posed for
photos with a rebel flag.
Roof’s federal attorneys have said
their client would be willing to plead guilty if the maximum punishment weren’t
on the table.
Due in part to problems in obtaining
lethal injection drugs, no one has been executed in South Carolina since 2011.
The federal government hasn’t put anyone to death since 2003.
In Columbia, the slain pastor of
Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney, was
honored with the unveiling of a new portrait in his beloved Senate chamber.
Pinckney’s widow, Jennifer, and his
two young daughters were among dozens of family members, fellow senators and
friends who filled the Senate chambers. The two girls pulled a purple drape
from the picture and stood smiling.
Pinckney is shown standing in his
revered church, nicknamed “Mother Emanuel” because of its role sheltering and
inspiring slaves, even after white slave owners ordered all black churches closed
before the Civil War. His hand sits on a pew, with light coming through one of
the church’s stained glass windows.
Jennifer Pinckney remembered her
husband as “a man that would pray for you and with you.”
Authorities said Roof attended most of
the hour-long Bible study before he started shooting.
“When we look at the
portrait of Sen. Pinckney we need to be reminded of both how he lived and why
he was killed in a massacre,”
Sen. Gerald Malloy said. “He was killed because of
ignorance and intolerance.”
Jennifer Pinkney said her husband
might have been too humble to think he deserved to have his image among
alongside Vice President John C. Calhoun and U.S. Sen. Strom Thurmond.
“You’re well-deserving to be with
these great men. Because you were great,” she said.
Clementa Pinckney is only the second
African-American honored among the roughly 30 portraits in the state Senate. —
(AP)
Brother of
Charleston shooting victim wants death penalty for shooter
Posted: Saturday,
June 18, 2016 12:15 am
McClatchy
Regional News
Charlotte —
Malcolm Graham is not ready to forgive the man accused a year ago of murdering
his sister.
But on the first anniversary of the
killings of Cynthia Graham Hurd and eight others during a prayer vigil at
historic Emanuel AME Church in Charleston, S.C., the former North Carolina
state senator from Charlotte has formed some strong opinions about an
appropriate punishment.
If Dylann Roof is found guilty of the
murders, Graham believes he deserves to die.
Graham avoids saying the defendant’s
name. For the next five days he and his family will be in his native
Charleston, his attention focused not on the confessed killer but on the lives
of his 54-year-old sister and the other victims.
Forgiveness?
Not now, he says. To forgive Roof,
Graham must first spend time thinking about him. He refuses. The closest he
came to dwelling on his sister’s killer was at Roof’s first court appearance.
There, and perhaps for the first time in his life, Graham believed he was in
the presence of evil.
For now, Graham says his spiritual
energy is aimed at rebuilding his faith even as he tries to understand what has
happened. The nature of his sister’s death, he says, compels him to speak his
family’s truth.
“Our truth, unfortunately,
is that our sister died in a church basement, simply because she was there and
simply because she was black,”
Graham says. “That’s the truth. That’s something we
should not run away from.”
He says he believes his support of the
death penalty is an intellectual response carved from his years as a state
legislator, not simply a neural firing from his pain.
He ticks off Roof’s alleged behavior
like he is checking a series of boxes:
“You invite yourself into a
church setting,”
he begins. “You are made to feel welcome there. You
worship with those in your presence for an hour. You shoot and kill them. You
terrorize five others. You say you want to start a race war. You show no sign
of remorse.
Forgiveness?
Given what his sister went through, he
believes it would border on the glib — a placebo for those unwilling to
contemplate the hate and racism behind both the shootings in Charleston and
last week’s even larger massacre in Orlando, Fla.
Two days after the deaths at Emanuel,
Nadine Collier, who lost her mother and two cousins, announced publicly that
she had forgiven the killer.
That quickly morphed into a
catchphrase assigned to all nine families and the city as a whole: Charleston
forgives.
Graham says he is still not ready to
play the scripted, feel-good role.
“Forgiveness is too passive
a response,”
he says quietly. “What happened needed more
understanding. More investigation. More awakening of consciousness.
“What occurred there was an
attack against a race of people. ... It was an attack against humanity. And
that deserves more consideration than a statement of forgiveness two days
afterward. Certainly I understand where that feeling comes from. And my loss is
no greater than any other family members’. So I respect that feeling. But I
can’t accept it.”
Over the next five days Hurd, a
longtime librarian, will have a library named in her honor. The University of
South Carolina and the College of Charleston have started prestigious
scholarships in her name. A mural depicting rows of Hurd’s beloved books will
be unveiled next week.
And then at the close of it all,
Cynthia Hurd will still be dead.
Forgiveness?
Graham says he is too busy trying to
make sense of it all. It helps, he says, that he is rebuilding his relationship
with God.
‘Help me
understand’
Carl Jung wrote often about
“the tension of opposites.” Is there good without evil? Can faith have any
meaning without the existence of doubt?
Graham, 53, says the Charleston
shooting shook his lifelong spiritual convictions.
He crystallizes his doubts,
emphasizing word after word, as if nailing them individually to a church door.
“How. Could. This. Happen. In. A.
Church?” he says. “This is where God is. This is his home. They were just
discussing his message. Why? Why? Help me understand.”
He presses on.
“This is where Cynthia felt the safest
and most at home in the world, and this is where she was made to suffer the
most pain,” Graham says.
He pauses.
“It challenged me,” he says.
He began talking daily with the Rev.
Dr. Clifford Jones, his longtime pastor at Friendship Missionary Baptist
Church. Graham says Jones offered him safe space for his spiritual crisis.
Jones describes the relationship of
faith and doubt as “an unresolved theological issue, and it’s one that
confronts us in our realities. And Malcolm’s reality is a murder, in a holy
place. How does one reconcile the sovereignty of God with a hate crime?”
Jones said he advised Graham to be
true to his feelings.
“Healing starts with honesty. You may
not like where you are. You may not like the facts of the situations you’re
confronted with. Some may seem irreconcilable. But if that’s what you have,
then that’s what you have to confront on your plate of faith,” he says.
The continued role of violence, evil,
hatred ... are they ever resolvable?
Jones says he is not sure.
At the very least there are no easy
answers.
“Malcolm has to live the rest of his
life with the loss of a sister who was murdered in a church,” Jones says
slowly.
“There are 50 families in Orlando.
Think of them. Their lives will never be the same. Never.” He pauses. “There is
so much anger in our world,” he says.
Forgiveness as decreed by Christ is
easier said than done, the pastor adds. “But I think we are always moving in
the direction of fulfilling that expectation.”
Graham?
“He’s on the path of forgiveness,”
Jones says. “But he’s not way down the road.”
The gift of time
Malcolm Graham last saw his
big sister alive at his older daughter’s college graduation party in May 2015.
Kim and Malcolm Graham’s
brick home in University City was filled with family and friends. At one point
Graham says he was looking for his next beer when his big sister pulled him out
on the back deck. She told him, preached to him really, to recognize and
celebrate the gifts of life.
Two weeks later, he and Kim
were getting ready for bed when a news crawl appeared at the bottom of their TV
screen. There had been a shooting at the Emanuel church. Graham says he
immediately thought of Cynthia.
When the first of the
Graham’s two daughters was born, Hurd sent the new parents a book: Marian
Wright Edelman’s “25 Lessons for Life.”
Graham read Lesson 10
during Hurd’s eulogy. “Remember and help America remember that the fellowship
of human beings is more important than the fellowship of race and class and
gender in a democratic society.”
Graham gets up and goes
looking for the book, finds it, then opens the front cover to share Hurd’s
inscription. In her closing, she asked her brother and his wife to “believe in
the future, with its hope, promise and everlasting renewal.”
That takes faith. Graham
says he’s working on it.
No comments:
Post a Comment