There is still much to be learned about what motivated the young man alleged to be behind the mass shooting in Charleston.
Dr. Scott Poland, a professor at Nova Southeastern University, studies mass killers. He has visited 15 school shootings, some of them mass killings and found a wide variety of shooters.
But, from what he knows so far about the Charleston church massacre, he thinks it may fit a familiar pattern.
In a closer look at photos of the accused killer you see hints of hate: a license plate promoting the Confederate States of America, and the flags on a jacket of now-defunct white-minority ruled Rhodesia and apartheid South Africa.
Add to that witness reports that Dylann Roof said he was at the church to kill Africans Americans and Attorney General Loretta Lynch quickly reached the conclusion that "this was a hate crime."
At Nova Southeastern University, psychologist Scott Poland teaches and studies the minds of mass killers.
"It will be a long time before we have answers, if we’ll ever get answers about why this terrible crime was committed," he said.
Local
But from what is known, Poland favors some possible motivations over others.
"One would be glory, the national attention and focus which unfortunately the shooter often gets... number two, some kind of grievance, anger, revenge, some kind of in justice."
As for a mental state, some are psychotic, some depressed but this one, Poland says, appears more of a psychopath.
"Someone who believes they were superior, they did have the right to kill other people, especially other people that were another race."
Poland also said choosing a black church may be less about religion than simply convenience, "mass shooters tend to pick confined locations, a school, a church, a place of business."
There’s a tragic history of black church killings in the South of course, four girls killed in Birmingham in 1963 weeks after Martin Luther King’s "I Have a Dream" speech.
Whether a Sikh temple, or a synagogue, a gathering place is an easy target for a killer seeking to kill those he hates.
"It’s twisted, it’s perverted, it’s not something you and I are going to be able to comprehend... but certainly he did have a logic and he picked a particular church and a black church," Poland said.
While we will undoubtedly learn more about what created this mass killer, Poland said we should also not forget the victims, the families, the parishioners, who he said will need counseling for many years to come.
The Southern Poverty Law Center has recorded thousands of hate crime-related incidents from 2003 through May 2015. Some of the hate crime incidents have included assault, murder, harassment, vandalism, and arson but also hate crime-related activities such as distributing hate reading materials.
This map has some of the data with specific incidents by date, city, state and description of the incident. Click the dots to read about each of them.
