When 21-year-old white supremacist Dylann Roof exited the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church in Charleston, South Carolina, on the night of June 17, 2015, he left 12 victims behind him. Of those 12, only three survived, and on December 15, 2016, a jury convicted Roof on 33 separate federal charges, including nine murders and 24 federal hate crimes. On January 10, 2017, an unrepentant Dylann Roof was sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Among Roof’s victims was Clementa “Clem” Pinckney, a South Carolina state senator and the senior pastor at Mother Emanuel, as the church is known in Charleston. The trial revealed Roof to be one of the most disturbing figures in American criminal history. He freely admitted that he wanted to start a race war with his murders and laughed on several occasions when the suffering of his victims and their families was under discussion.
Needless to say, the Mother Emanuel shootings opened a wound not only in Charleston but also in the hearts and souls of feeling human beings everywhere. That’s why Ojai artist John Aaron created his beautiful work of ceramic relief sculpture — to portray the Mother Emanuel Church and to memorialize those killed in the shooting.
