Red flags don't come much brighter
By Kathleen Parker
As the entire nation reeled from the mass shootings in El Paso and Dayton, South Carolinians were met with news that a local teen had made violent, racist videos and threatened to shoot up his high school.
Red flags don’t come much brighter.
In conversations across the state the past few days — on social media and around kitchen tables — the name Dylann Roof has been inescapable. Although vicious videos are not in the same vein as a mass murder, this state will forever be haunted by Roof’s slaughter of nine parishioners at Charleston’s Mother Emanuel AME Church four years ago. Along with that horrible memory is the fear that, just as no one saw Roof coming, we might miss the next one. Roof had recorded videos and taken pictures of himself before taking his dreams of a race war to the so-called City of Steeples.
In the case of the local teen, townspeople familiar with his well-respected family were shocked that such apparent racial hatred could have developed to such an extent and hadn’t been identified sooner.
The student’s videos — and subsequent actions by Columbia’s Cardinal Newman High School and the Richland County Sheriff’s Department — speak to the heightened focus on identifying red flags and taking prompt action. The teen, whose name is being withheld by law enforcement and school officials because he’s a minor, has been banned from the campus, according to local news outlets. In one video, the teen threatened to “shoot up the school,” which led to his arrest on charges of making threats against students. Deputies confiscated firearms from his home.
The boy’s films are painful to watch. In one, he appears to use two rifles to repeatedly shoot a box of Air Jordans, which he says is “the favorite pair of shoes for a black man.” He uses the most-vulgar racial slur and says that he hates African Americans.
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