Late Wednesday night a white man described as being clean-shaven, in his early twenties, with sandy blonde hair and a slender build entered into a historic African-American church in Charleston, S.C., and opened fire, killing nine people, in what authorities are calling a hate crime.

Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen called the crime a tragedy, and said that the gunman should be considered incredibly dangerous.

“This is a tragedy that no community should have to experience,” Mullen said. “It is senseless and unfathomable in today’s society that someone would walk into a church during a prayer meeting and take their lives.”

Mullen said that the police thought they had tracked the suspect with a police dog, but he got away, and is still at large. He added that there would be a reward for information leading to the shooter’s arrest, and that the FBI would aid in the investigation.

The investigation was complicated when a bomb threat was called in, and the authorities were forced to close a large section of the street where the shooting occurred, pushing the media back a safe distance.

Authorities and the community are outraged and calling the shootings a hate crime.

“The only reason that someone could walk into a church and shoot people praying is out of hate,” said Charleston Mayor Joseph P. Riley. “It is the most dastardly act that one could possibly imagine, and we will bring that person to justice… This is one hateful person.”

Soon after the shooting a group of pastors and community members huddled together praying in a circle across the street. The president of the Charleston NAACP, Dot Scott, said that she had spoken with a female survivor who said the gunman walked into the church and briefly sat down before standing up and opening fire. Scott said the gunman told the woman that he was letting her live so she could tell others what had happened.

“There is no greater coward that a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people engaged in the study of scripture,” NAACP President and CEO Cornell Brooks said in a statement early Thursday. “Today I mourn as an AME minister, as a student and teacher of scripture, as well as a member of the NAACP.”

Among those dead was the church’s minister and South Carolina state senator Clementa Pinckney, 41, who had been a pastor since he was 18. Pinckney was the youngest African-American elected to the South Carolina legislature when he took office at age 23, and had been a state senator since 2000.

The church is a historic African-American church that traces its founding to 1816 when several churches split from Charleston’s Methodist Episcopal Church. Denmark Vesey, one of its founders, attempted to organize a slave revolt in 1822, but was caught, and white landowners burned the church in revenge. Parishioners worshiped secretly until after the Civil War.

Anyone with any information on the gunman’s whereabouts is asked to contact the Charleston Police Dispatch at (843)743-7200.