DOJ reaches $88M settlement with South Carolina church shooting victims

The Justice Department announced Thursday it reached an $88 million settlement over 2015’s mass shooting at a church in South Carolina. This includes $63 million for the families of the nine people killed and $25 million for five survivors who were inside the church at the time of the shooting.

The video above shows survivors and family members reacting to the settlement. The families had sued over a faulty background check that allowed Dylan Roof to buy the gun he used in the shooting.

“Plaintiffs agreed to settle claims alleging that the FBI was negligent when it failed to prohibit the sale of a gun by a licensed firearms dealer to the shooter, a self-proclaimed white supremacist, who wanted to start a ‘race war’ and specifically targeted the 200-year-old historically African-American congregation,” the Justice Department wrote in its announcement.

Months before the shooting, Roof was arrested on a drug possession charge. According to court documents, a series of clerical errors and missteps ensued.

The errors included wrongly listing the sheriff’s office as the arresting agency in the drug case. An examiner with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System found some information on the arrest when Roof tried to buy the gun. However, the examiner needed more information to deny the sale, so she sent a fax to a sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office said it didn’t have the report and directed the examiner back to the police department that arrested Roof.

However, that department was not found in a federal listing of law enforcement agencies. After getting in touch with the wrong police department, the examiner did nothing more.

Roof was sentenced to death by a federal jury in 2017.

“You know, there is an unfortunate reality in our country and that is that African-Americans have not always seen equal justice in our courts,” attorney Mullins McLeod said. “This settlement, however, is a beacon for all of us and a reminder that justice does exist.”

According to another attorney for the families, the final figure of the church shooting settlement was purposeful. “88” is a number typically associated with white supremacy, and it was the number of bullets Roof said he had taken with him to the attack.

“We get to give a big ‘F-U’ to the white supremacists and racists in this country by saying that we’re taking this tragedy that they tried to tear our country apart with and build black communities in generational wealth,” Bakari Sellers said Thursday.