“It’s like we’re being punished for something, only I can’t figure out what.”
A sad and terrifying portrait of some American lives by Stephanie McCrummen for the Washington Post: He showed them his gun. He spoke of doing ‘something crazy.’ Why do the friends Dylann Roof stayed with before the Charleston church shooting shrug about their inaction?
- One or more of the Meek brothers and their friends are playing the Xbox almost constantly.
- Kim Konzny vacuums as her son Jacob plays video games and Lindsey checks her phone.
“Who’s here?” Jacob says, jumping up and peeking through the blinds, but the view is the same as ever — no people, an abandoned trailer next door, a skinny pine tree and some empty vodka minis in a patch of weedy grass. Beyond is the whoosh of highway traffic and the rest of Lexington County, a place that is roughly 80 percent white, the result of decades of white flight from neighboring counties and Ku Klux Klan activity, including a drive-by shooting of three black teenagers in 1996 — not that any sense of history filters into the trailer. “The KKK, that’s one thing I don’t understand,” as Joey says. “Was the KKK an actual violent thing?”