Friend: Roof Wanted To "Do Something Crazy"
WHITFIELD: Good morning, again, everyone. Thanks so much for joining me. I'm Fredricka Whitfield. We are following the latest on that Charleston, South Carolina church massacre. We have just learned that gunman, Dylann Roof, is now on suicide watch. We are tracking stunning new details about Roof including that he had seven ammunition magazines when he gunned down his victims. According to a CNN affiliate, WBTV, Roof told authorities that he thought about not opening fire after he got to know the people in that bible study because they were so nice to him. And that he was planning to go to Nashville following the attack, because he had, quote, "never been there before." In the meantime, the nation continues to grieve. Today rallies are unfolding across the country like this one in New York. All of this as questions continues to emerge about whether signs were missed by those who knew the gunman. People who knew Dylann Roof say that he talked about sparking a race war and wanted to bring back segregation.</s>JOEY MEEK, FRIEND OF DYLANN ROOF: He was saying he wanted segregation. He wanted a race war. He wanted white with white and black with black.</s>UNIDENTIFIED MALE: What did you say when he said that?</s>MEEK: I didn't agree with his opinion at all. We just argued about it.</s>WHITFIELD: So joining me to talk about all of this is former FBI agent, Michael German, who is now a fellow for the Brennan Center for Justice Liberty and National Security Program. Good to see you, and Jeff Gardere, psychiatrist and professor of behavioral medicine at Touro College, good to see you as well. All right, so Gentlemen, you know, we keep hearing words like wakeup call after this and other tragedies here in Charleston, South Carolina. We have heard it in Newtown, after Aurora. Aren't there red flags before someone does something like this? So, Jeff, what are the flags that people really need to pay attention to and then be proactive and do something and say something to someone?</s>JEFF GARDERE, PROFESSOR, BEHAVIORAL MEDICINE, TOURO COLLEGE: Well, there are a few things, and we see this in the profile of shooters and certainly in this shooter isolating oneself and not having many friends, but this overreaching anger, a hate of others whether it's a hate of humanity or in this case, a hate for black people. So all of that is part, I think, of the red flags that were missed here that people saw that was happening and did nothing about it. Throw in the mix that there might be some sort of opiate addiction and other behavioral issues.</s>WHITFIELD: Michael, the friend we just heard, he even went on to say that he was worried about Dylann and what he could potentially do. He knew at one point he had a gun. The friend said he retrieved the gun and hid it, but then hours later, he had second thoughts and decided that he better return it because the last thing he wanted to be was to be accused of stealing someone's gun. He admits he was thinking about himself, but then he also says, you know, he wishes that more could be done. What does a person that is torn, your friend or family member, you recognize something weird but you are not quite sure what to do? We keep hearing that repeatedly.</s>MICHAEL GERMAN, FORMER FBI SPECIAL AGENT: So the white supremacist movement in the United States is fairly large. There are hundreds of people involved in it probably, you know, far more people who have a racial view. So we have to be careful not to association the racial views directly with the violence. But clearly where someone has made a specific warning and if they have made a specific warning and have weapons to carry out that threat, obviously that's something that somebody should take seriously and report to authorities.</s>WHITFIELD: And then Jeff, you know, as we, you know, look at photographs of Dylann Roof, people have made observations, whether it is the flag of Rhodesia. You know, statements, outward statements, even if it is not verbal, but perhaps it is something that someone is wearing that one would think, I think these are the conversations happening everywhere. When we think that a family member, a friend, somebody would say, what does that mean? If you're unfamiliar with it, what does that mean, and then you hear what the definition is or the motivation behind what someone is wearing or the message that they are trying to send, that it could be a prelude to something. We heard from Jason Johnson a moment ago. He talked about the hope is that maybe some personality responsibility would come from tragedies like this. What is the personal responsibility that all of us have to act upon something when we think something is awry?</s>GARDERE: Well, first and foremost, there have been too many of these cases where people thought, well, we weren't really sure. We knew this person was angry. We didn't want to get them in trouble. Certainly, we want to respect the civil rights of every single person. But our responsibility really is to talk to other people within that person's sphere and see whether the dots are connecting here. This is a term that we call triangulation, being able to share information so that we can see whether something really is amiss, whether something is bubbling up and is about to boil over. And so it is important that we begin that conversation with people around us and if we really do fear that a person may act out for the safety of the public but even for the safety of that individual, we should contact authorities. Because at the end of the day, there may be a real mental health issue in this case mixed in with some very hateful racial views, which is that recipe for disaster.</s>WHITFIELD: The notion of a lone wolf acting out or the influence that is inspiring this lone wolf to act or whether this person is associated with a group.</s>GERMAN: Obviously, this has been a persistent problem. One of the major problems in our inability to understand it and to develop effective methods of preventing it is that we don't do accurate data collection. The federal government hates crimes data is woefully inadequate. A National Institute of Justice study in 2005 suggested that the data that the FBI collects and publishes on hate crimes is up to 15 times less than the number of actual hate crimes that occur. So before we can really understand a problem and address it effectively, we really have to have accurate data collection.</s>WHITFIELD: All right, Michael German, Jeff Gardere, thanks so both of you, Gentlemen. Appreciate your insight. Coming up next, how the Charleston massacre is putting renewed emphasis on church safety? A Texas church sharing its story now.