Look of Evil
Posted on June 18, 2015
"The steeple of Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, SC" by Spencer Means from New York City, USA - The steeple of Emanuel African Methodist Church, Charleston, SC. Licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.
The vacant eyes.
That’s what is so striking about the pictures of the latest mass murderer.
Dylan Storm Roof, who coldly killed 9 people in an iconic African American Church in Charleston, South Carolina, had the same faraway look in eyes that James Holmes, the murderer in the Aurora, Colorado theater-shooting, had.
His eyes also looked similar to Adam Lanza, who killed the small children in Sandy Hook.
If you look at mug shots that are sometimes posted on different websites, you will see the same eyes.
They are dead eyes. Life doesn’t seem to escape from them.
It’s frightening.
Like Lanza, Roof was given a gun by one of his parents as a present.
Bad move.
I don’t know if Dylan Roof is mentally ill. But I would venture to guess that he is.
His eyes look dead.
According to classmates, Roof was a heavy drug user. He was a recluse, somebody who kind of blended in the crowd.
It’s so stereotypical of these kinds of killers.
The Charleston shooting is so shocking because it happened in a church. Roof, apparently, spent an hour with the Bible study group before he started shootings. Maybe he was trying to talk himself out of committing the heinous acts that he would later commit.
Some were quick to call this a hate crime, and there seems to be some evidence that Roof was a racist with Confederate sympathies.
But if you just look at the pictures of Mr. Roof, you see a boy whose eyes are dead to the world. He is not fit in the head.
I don’t know what causes this kind of mental illness, the kind of mental illness that we see with painful regularity afflicting young men across the country.
I don’t know if the drugs these kids take causes them to wig out or if the drugs make a bad situation slightly better.
But this kind of event is all too familiar.
I feel for the families and for the City of Charleston.
Every time something like this happens, I say the same thing. I don’t know the right solution, but I do know that doing nothing is not a good option.