CHARLESTON, SOUTH CAROLINA — The suspect in the gruesome, racially-motivated assault on a Charleston, South Carolina church has been apprehended. Sources close to the investigation say that 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof has been captured alive in Shelby, North Carolina. Dylann is accused of spending an hour in a prayer service at Emanuel AME Church in Charleston before uttering, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” Less than 24 hours after the massacre, authorities had their suspect in custody.
The fact that Roof was taken alive has raised some eyebrows in the law enforcement community. “I just don’t get why they broke protocol,” Sgt. Dick Caruthers told The Political Garbage Chute. Caruthers is a 25-year veteran of the Mount Robles, South Carolina police force. “I mean, we all know current training is that any and all suspects are to be apprehended except when you want to just summarily execute them instead.” Caruthers pointed to recent shootings of suspects in high-profile cases in Ferguson, Missouri, Cleveland, Ohio and Baltimore, Maryland as evidence of this new police policy.
“Shoot first, ask questions and follow due process later,” Caruthers told us. “That’s how we’ve been saving the taxpayers all kinds of money on costly ‘trials’ and ‘lawyers’ and ‘due process under the law’ and shit.” Sgt. Caruthers said that “when you’re out on duty, you don’t have time to consider whether your actions are consistent with how you’re supposed to uphold the law” and that “acting as judge, jury and executioner may not be what our laws are about in this country, but, you know, what are ya gonna do?”
A call placed to local authorities in North Carolina, near where the arrest of Roof was made, connected The Political Garbage Chute with Capt. Tom Richlandsonstein. Capt. Richlandsonstein tells us that the reason Storm was able to be taken in was that unlike other recent perpetrators, he chose to be white-skinned and be armed. “Yeah, we were all a little thrown for a loop down at the station,” Richlandsonstein told us. “I mean, we know exactly how to handle situations with unarmed black people; you shoot them and claim to be scared later. But for armed white kids, we didn’t have much to go on. So we took a look at that cop killer case from a few months ago, where the dude hid out in the woods for a few days after killing a couple cops, and thought, ‘yeah, this Roof kid is white and armed too, this should do the trick.’ So that was our game plan. Go with him being white and armed. Bing-bang-boom, arrested alive.”
One source placed relatively close to, but not quite next to, but kinda still in the same vicinity of the arrest said that Roof’s race and armaments were ‘absolutely key’ to bringing him in alive. “You don’t bring in armed white kids dead. What kind of message does that send to the other white kids in the country? If we just summarily executed white kids instead of bringing them into court to be processed in the system, by the system in a humane way, what other choice will they have after a generation or two of this than to completely and utterly ignore and disrespect the institutions that are incarcerating the kids they aren’t killing dead in the streets,” our source asked rhetorically.
“Look, I’m not saying we should make a precedent out of this,” Caruthers said. “Because God only knows what kind of craziness would ensue if we dared to really treat everyone under the law equally, without any presupposition of guilt, but clearly in some circumstances you have to make exceptions. And in this case, with the suspect being white and armed to the teeth, having just shot nine people to death, they had to swallow their pride, go against their instinct, and follow due process on this one.”
