Following the tragic events that occurred on Wednesday, South Carolina Gov. Nikki Haley believes that Dylan Storm Roof, the gunman who killed nine people during a shooting spree at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., should get the death penalty.
"These are nine families that are struggling. This is a state that is hurt by the fact that nine people innocently were killed," Haley said in an interview on Friday on NBC's "Today" show. "We will absolutely want him to have he death penalty. This is the worst hate that I've seen and what the country has seen in a long time. We will fight this and we will fight this as hard as we can."
Twenty-one-year-old Roof was arrested on Thursday in North Carolina, one day after nine people were killed during a Bible study at a historic church for African Americans in downtown Charleston.
Officials have decided to classify this mass-murder as a hate crime, according to Politics USA.
The gunman left a ranting, racist manifesto on the Internet, calling for a new civil war in America before staging his massacre and pinpointed Charleston as his target because of its high population of blacks and complains that there is "no real KKK" to help him, according to the Daily Mail.
"This is an absolute hate crime," Haley said. "I've been talking with investigators who were going through the interviews. They said they looked pure evil in the eye yesterday. Without question this is hate."
