CHARLESTON, S.C. — A month after a white supremacist went on a killing spree inside a historic Black church in downtown Charleston in June 2015, the FBI director at the time admitted something had gone terribly wrong.
Not only were nine Black parishioners dead after attending a weekly Wednesday night Bible study at Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church, but the killer got and used a gun he should never have been allowed to legally obtain.
“The bottom line is clear,” then-FBI Director James Comey said at the time, nearly a month after the shooting. “Dylann Roof should not have been able to legally buy that gun that day.”
On Thursday, the federal government announced it had reached an $88 million wrongful death settlement with the families of the nine Black churchgoers murdered by a white nationalist who said he set out to start a race war.
It is now among the largest settlements reached by the FBI.
At the center of the decision was a clerical error that exposed a crack in the federal background check system.
In the wake of the massacre, it came to be known as “the Charleston loophole.”
When Roof went to Shooter’s Choice gun store in West Columbia to buy a firearm in April 2015, legally, the sale should not have gone through.
Roof, who was 21 at the time, had an arrest record for drug use — a prohibiting factor that should have barred him from buying any gun.
However, under current federal law, a gun sale can move forward if a background check isn’t completed within three days.
And so, because Roof’s background check went unfinished after the three-day waiting period, he was able to pick up the .45-caliber Glock pistol.
Two months later, he used that gun to kill nine people in the 2015 hate crime at Mother Emanuel Church.
In lawsuits filed by the families and three adult survivors in the year after the mass shooting, they alleged that the FBI was negligent in performing a background check on the man who killed their loved ones.
The victims in the church shooting were the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, Cynthia Hurd, Susie Jackson, Ethel Lance, the Rev. Depayne Middleton-Doctor, Tywanza Sanders, the Rev. Daniel L. Simmons Sr., Myra Thompson and the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was also a state senator and a pastor at the church at the time of his death.
In announcing the settlement Thursday, the FBI admitted no fault in the case of Roof’s background check. Rather, the settlement sends a message, in part, that “the FBI wants to instill confidence in all of us and they want to do their job exceptionally well, which they do,” said Mullins McLeod, a Charleston attorney who helped litigate the Emanuel victims’ lawsuits.
“The settlement doesn’t do anything to change or alter the existing landscape” of gun sales and background checks, McLeod said. “But what it does do is, I think it shares with everyone how significant and important a job the FBI understands their role is and how well of a job they do.”
As the victims’ lawsuits wound through the court system, lawmakers tried to pass legislation to close or at least mitigate the Charleston loophole. However, those attempts have so far been unsuccessful.
The closest attempt came in 2019, when a bill that to extend the review period for FBI background checks on gun purchases passed the U.S. House along a mostly party-line vote. It sought to extend the review period from three days to 10 days.
The effort was led by House Majority Whip Jim Clyburn, D-S.C., and two former congressmen: New York Republican Peter King and South Carolina Democrat Joe Cunningham.
However, the legislation stalled in the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate.
Clyburn reintroduced the bill in March, where it again passed in the House. It now heads to the Senate.
Roof is currently on federal death row in Indiana.
He was sentenced to death in January 2017 by a federal jury in Charleston, becoming the first person in the U.S. sentenced to death for a federal hate crime. It took the jury less than three hours to decide on the death penalty. U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel presided.
A federal appeals court upheld his conviction and death sentence this summer, after Roof claimed the court did not thoroughly vet if he was mentally ill.
“No cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did,” a three-judge panel on the 4th Circuit Court of Appeals wrote in its decision. “His crimes qualify him for the harshest penalty that a just society can impose.”
