Dylann Roof’s friend gets 27 months for failing to report a crime and lying to FBI

The only person with whom Dylann Roof shared his racist plot to massacre worshipers at a historically black South Carolina church was sentenced Tuesday to 27 months in prison for failing to report a crime and for lying to the FBI.

Joey Meek cried at his sentencing Tuesday in Charleston by the same federal judge who presided over Roof’s trial, which ended in January with Roof being sentenced to death for the slaughter of nine people at Emanuel AME church.

“I’m really, really sorry. A lot of beautiful lives were taken,” said Meek, who began to cry at sentencing.

Meek had faced 27 to 33 months behind bars.

U.S. District Judge Richard Gergel said he hoped the sentence would serve as a deterrent for anyone in the future who learns of something so serious and fails to come forward to authorities. He added that Meek was fortunate another massacre didn’t occur because of he delayed in identifying Roof.

No family members of the victims spoke at sentencing.

Meek said Roof shared his plan to shoot blacks at the historic African-American church in Charleston during a night at Meek’s house where they drank vodka, snorted cocaine, smoked marijuana and played video games. Authorities said that was about a week before the June 17, 2015, killings.

Meek wasn’t prosecuted for failing to report Roof’s plans, but — authorities said — for stopping a friend from calling police after hearing about the shooting and reporting Roof as a suspect.

Federal prosecutors also said Meek lied to the FBI by first denying Roof shared his plans.

Meek had agreed to plead guilty earlier and help prosecutors. But they never called him during Roof’s trial, in which Roof acted as his own lawyer for much of the proceedings and put up almost no defense.

Then just before Meek was initially set to be sentenced last month, prosecutors asked for a stiffer sentence than guidelines recommended, seeking to make an example of him and reflect the seriousness of the crime that Meek could have stopped if he’d picked up the phone.

Meek’s lawyer, Deborah Barbier, said prior to sentencing that that was unfair.

She said Meek had sent handwritten letters of apology to the families of each victim. She said he thinks often of what happen and is pained.

Barbier also had said previously that the government shares the burden of not stopping Roof by failing to finish a background check when he went to buy the gun used in the killings.

“This allegation ignores the government’s own failures in allowing Roof to buy and possess a handgun with pending drug charge,” Barbier wrote previously in asking Gergel not to give Meek a longer sentence than guidelines call for.

Meek and Roof, both 22, met in middle school after Roof’s mother asked Meek to be her son’s friend. They drifted apart after Roof moved away in high school, then reconnected months before the shooting when Roof told Meek on Facebook that he saw his old friend’s mugshot online.

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