Dylann Roof

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American mass murderer, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi who perpetrated the Charleston church shooting. During a Bible study on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Roof murdered nine people and injured a tenth, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney. After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the center of a manhunt that ended the morning after the shooting with his arrest in Shelby, North Carolina. He later confessed that he committed the shooting in hopes of igniting a race war. Roof's actions in Charleston have been widely described as domestic terrorism.

Three days after the shooting, a website titled The Last Rhodesian was discovered and later confirmed by officials to be owned by Roof. The website contained photos of Roof posing with symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism, along with a manifesto in which he outlined his views toward Black people, among other groups. He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and black-on-white crime.

On December 15, 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all 33 federal charges (including hate crimes) against him stemming from the shooting; on January 11, 2017, he was sentenced to death for those crimes. On March 31, 2017, Roof agreed to plead guilty in South Carolina state court to all state charges pending against him—nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony—to avoid a second death sentence. In return, he accepted a sentence of life in prison without parole. On April 10, 2017, Roof was sentenced to nine consecutive sentences of life without parole after formally pleading guilty to state murder charges. He is currently awaiting execution for the federal convictions on death row at USP Terre Haute.

Early life

Roof was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to Franklin Bennett Roof (nicknamed Benn), a carpenter and a construction contractor, and Amelia "Amy" Cowles, a bartender. His parents had divorced but were temporarily reconciled at the time of his birth. When Roof was five, his father married Paige Mann (née Hastings) in November 1999; they divorced after 10 years of marriage. Bennett Roof was verbally and physically abusive toward Mann. The family mostly lived in South Carolina, though from about 2005 to 2008, they temporarily moved to the Florida Keys. There is no information about Roof attending local schools there.

According to a 2009 affidavit filed for Mann's divorce, Roof exhibited "obsessive compulsive behavior" as he grew up, obsessing over germs and insisting on having his hair cut in a certain style. When he was in middle school, he started smoking marijuana.

In nine years, Roof attended at least seven schools in two South Carolina counties, including Dreher High School in Columbia, and White Knoll High School in Lexington, in which he repeated the ninth grade, finishing it in another school. He stopped attending classes in 2010 and, according to his family, dropped out of school and spent his time alternating between playing video games and taking drugs. He was on the rolls of a local Lutheran congregation, but it was unclear if he had recently attended.

Prior to the attack, Roof was living alternately in Bennett's and Cowles' homes in downtown Columbia and Hopkins, respectively, but was mostly raised by his stepmother. For several weeks preceding the attack, Roof had also been occasionally living in the home of an old friend from middle school and the latter's mother, two brothers, and girlfriend. He allegedly spent his time using drugs and getting drunk. He had been working as a landscaper at the behest of his father, but quit the job prior to the shooting.

His maternal uncle, Carson Cowles, said that he expressed concern about the social withdrawal of his then-19-year-old nephew, because "he still didn't have a job, a driver's license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time." Cowles said he tried to mentor Roof, but Roof rejected his attempts to help and they drifted apart. According to Mann, Roof cut off all contact with her after her divorce from his father. When his sister planned to be married, he did not respond to her invitation to the event.

A former high school classmate said that despite Roof's racist comments, some of his friends in school were African-American.

Earlier contacts with police

Roof had a prior police record consisting of two arrests, both made in the months preceding the attack. He was investigated on one occasion during this period but without arrest or charge.

On February 28, 2015, mall security at the Columbiana Centre in Columbia called police after Roof, wearing all-black clothing, asked employees unsettling questions. During police questioning, Roof consented to be searched, and was found to be in possession of several strips of buprenorphine/naloxone, a prescription medication for opioid use disorder which is sometimes sold illegally, but usually for therapeutic rather than recreational use. As Roof did not have a valid prescription, he was arrested for a misdemeanor charge of drug possession, and was subsequently banned from the Columbiana Centre for a year.

On March 13, 2015, Roof was investigated for loitering in his parked car near a park in downtown Columbia. He had been recognized by an off-duty police officer who investigated his March 2 questioning; the officer then called a colleague to investigate. A police officer conducted a search of his vehicle and found a forearm grip for an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and six unloaded magazines, all capable of holding 40 rounds. When asked about it, Roof informed the officer that he wanted to purchase an AR-15, but did not have enough money to do so. He was not charged, as it was not illegal in South Carolina to possess a forearm grip.

On April 26, 2015, Roof was arrested again for trespassing on the Columbiana Centre mall's grounds in violation of the ban. The ban was then extended for three additional years.

According to James Comey, speaking in July 2015, Roof's February arrest was at first written as a felony, which would have required an inquiry into the charge during a firearms background examination. It was legally a misdemeanor charge and was incorrectly written as a felony at first due to a data entry error made by a jail clerk. Comey said that Roof could potentially have been prohibited from buying firearms under a law that barred "unlawful user[s] of or addicted to any controlled substance" from owning firearms, although UCLA Law Professor Eugene Volokh wrote that it is unclear whether Roof's misdemeanor possession charge would have meant he met that definition.

Charleston church shooting

On the evening of June 17, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina. During a routine Bible study at the church, a white man about 21 years old, later identified as Roof, opened fire with a handgun, killing nine people. Roof was unemployed and living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the attack.

Motivation

According to a childhood friend, Roof went on a rant about the killing of Trayvon Martin and the 2015 Baltimore protests that were sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody. He also often claimed that "Blacks were taking over the world". Roof reportedly told friends and neighbors of his plans to kill people, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously.

One image from his Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket decorated with two obsolete flags used as emblems among American white supremacist movements, those of Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa. Another online photo showed Roof sitting on the hood of his car with an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it. According to his roommate, Roof expressed his support for racial segregation in the United States and had wanted to start a civil war.

One of the friends who briefly hid Roof's gun away from him said, "I don't think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school. But I think he couldn't get into the school because of the security ... so I think he just settled for the church." An African-American friend of his said that he never witnessed Roof expressing any racial prejudice, but also said that a week before the shooting, Roof had confided in him that he would commit a shooting at the college.

On the day he was captured (June 18, 2015), Roof confessed to committing the Charleston attack with the intention of starting a race war, and reportedly told investigators he almost did not go through with the shooting because members of the church study group had been so nice to him.

Federal prosecutors said in August 2016 that Roof was "self-radicalized" online, instead of adopting his white supremacist ideology "through his personal associations or experiences with white supremacist groups or individuals or others".