The Charleston Shooter's Sister Was Arrested For Bringing A Gun To School On Walkout Day

On Wednesday, Charleston shooter Dylann Roof's sister was arrested on weapons and drug charges after allegedly bringing a knife, pepper spray, and marijuana to AC Flora High School in South Carolina, where she is a student. Earlier in the day, 18-year-old Morgan Roof wrote on Snapchat that she hopes students who participated in Wednesday's anti-gun walkout "get shot," reasoning that "it's fixing to be nothing but black people" walking out. Nobody was injured in the incident.

"Your [sic] walking out of the allowed time of 17min, they are letting you do this, nothing is gonna change what tf you think it's gonna do?" Morgan wrote on Snapchat Wednesday. "I hope it's a trap and y'all get shot we know it's fixing to be nothing but black people walkin [sic] out anyway."

In a later statement, AC Flora principle Susan Childs explained that student leaders at the school had requested to spend 17 minutes on Wednesday commemorating the victims of the school shooting in Parkland, Florida, the month before. She added that the "walkout went well with only a minor verbal disagreement that occurred at dismissal from the event."

However, Morgan "was dealt with in a swift and severe manner" by school administrators after her Snapchat post made the rounds, Child said, as it "caused quite a disruption" at the school.

"The posting was not a threat," Childs wrote, "but was extremely inappropriate."

Later in the day, Morgan was arrested by a school resource officer after she was allegedly found to be possessing weapons and marijuana, FOX 57 reports. She was subsequently taken to Alvin S. Glenn Detention Center, and her bond was set to $5,000 on Wednesday night. Morgan isn't allowed to return to AC Flora, ABC 7 reports. WIS 10 reporter Chad Mills says that she "was quiet and seemed upset" during her bond hearing.

South Carolina Gov. Henry McMaster addressed Wednesday's incident in a statement, saying that "potential tragedy was avoided at AC Flora High School." He also said that state legislators should pass a law "placing a trained, certified police officer in every school, in every county, all day, every day."

In 2015, Morgan's brother murdered nine black parishioners at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. That shooting inadvertently exposed a major shortcoming in the FBI's National Instant Criminal Background Check System for gun purchases, a flaw that's since been named "the Charleston loophole." He was sentenced to death in 2017 on federal hate crimes charges and is currently awaiting execution.

In her statement, Childs said that there had been also been a second report Wednesday of a student being in possession of a weapon, but that this report turned out to be unfounded.

Gun violence in schools became the topic of fierce national debate after the Parkland shooting in February, in which a gunman killed 17 students and staff members on campus. Several survivors of the Parkland shooting subsequently helped organize The March for Our Lives, an anti-gun march scheduled for to take place March 24 in Washington, D.C., and thousands of students across the country walked out of class Wednesday to protest congressional inaction on gun violence. Earlier in the week, activists placed 7,000 pairs of shoes on the Capitol lawn in Washington D.C. — one for each child who's been killed by gun violence since the 2012 Sandy Hook massacre.

Sixteen Americans have been killed in mass shootings since Parkland, according to the Gun Violence Archive. In addition, there were three accidental school shootings in the single week leading up to Morgan's arrest, one of which left a 17-year-old student dead. A study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics found that guns have become the third-leading cause of death for American children.