Police say the suspect in a shooting that left nine people dead in a Charleston church on Wednesday night, had sat with churchgoers for about an hour before launching the deadly attack. The suspect is still at large.

The search for the killer of nine people at an African American church in Charleston, South Carolina, continues. The police described it as a hate crime. At a prayer meeting on Wednesday evening, others were also wounded.

The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church (Emanuel AME), founded in 1816 in downtown Charleston, is the oldest of its kind in the southern US.

The Reverend Clementa Pinckney, a Democrat member of the South Carolina State Senate, was identified among the dead. 

Chief Gregory Mullen emphasized his department’s commitment to catching the man suspected of killing nine people at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston. Police confirm they currently do not know where the suspect is.

House Minority Leader Todd Rutherford told the Associated Press that Clementa Pinckney, 41, who also served as the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, was one of nine people killed when a gunman opened fire during a prayer meeting.

“He never had anything bad to say about anybody, even when I thought he should,” Rutherford, D-Columbia, said of Pinckney. “He was always out doing work either for his parishioners or his constituents. He touched everybody.”

Police said they had not identified any of the victims and were investigating the shooting as a possible hate crime. The gunman, described as a white man in his early 20s, was still at large early Thursday.

The Post and Courier newspaper reported that Pinckney had attended a legislative session earlier in the day at the state capital in Columbia. However, The State newspaper reported that Pinckney had returned to Charleston to attend a fundraiser for Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton before going to the church.

According to his biography on the church’s website, Pinckney was first appointed a pastor at age 18. He was elected to the South Carolina House of Representatives in 1996 at age 23, making him the youngest African-American to be elected to the legislature. Pinckney was elected to the state Senate four years later. He was married and a father of two children.

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