Everything Known About Charleston Shooting Suspect Dylann Roof

Dylann Roof

The man accused of killing nine inside a black church wore pro-apartheid flags, made a ‘lot of racist jokes,’ and ‘wanted to start a civil war.’

Police arrested Dylann Storm Roof hours after he allegedly killed nine people at a historic black church in Charleston. Roof, 21, is from Lexington, South Carolina, and was taken into custody in Shelby, North Carolina. At a press conference, Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said a citizen’s tip led police to Roof’s car. Mullen refused to comment on whether Roof admitted to the shooting but said the suspect was cooperative. 

Roof was previously arrested on April 26 on a trespassing charge and was awaiting moderation. On February 28, Roof was arrested for drug possession at a mall in Columbia. The Wall Street Journal reports a police incident report said Roof possessed Suboxone, a pain drug sometimes used to treat opiate addiction, without a prescription.

A sparse Facebook page, now taken down, showed an image of Roof in a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe).

Another Facebook photo of Roof sitting on the roof of his car showed an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it. 

John Mullins, who went to high school with Roof, told The Daily Beast that he remembers him as being “kind of wild.”

“He used drugs heavily a lot,” Mullins said. “It was obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”

Remembering the victims of the African Methodist Episcopal Church

White Knoll High School had a mix of black and white students. Mullins says they occasionally mixed, and the school had “a lot of preps, a little bit of gang members, and a lot of outcasts.” But Roof wasn’t one of the outcasts, Mullins said.

Yet Roof did have a reputation for spouting racist messages.

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

But now, “the things he said were kind of not joking,” Mullins added.

Joseph Meek Jr. told the Associated Press that he and Roof were best friends in middle school, then reconnected a few weeks ago when Roof reached out to Meek on Facebook. Meek says Roof had begun ranting about the murders of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray and saying that black people were “taking over the world.”

“He said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” Meek said. “He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I said, ‘That’s not the way it should be.' But he kept talking about it.”

Roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News that Roof was “planning something like that for six months.” 

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

A woman who claimed to be the mother of Roof's former stepmother told theJournal he began to change in recent years.

“He apparently told people that he was involved in groups, racist groups,” she said, adding that he stopped going to high school. 

“He turned into a loner in the last couple of years and no one knew why,” she said. “He just fell off the grid somehow.” 

Another high school classmate told The Daily Beast that Roof was a nondescript student. “A lot of people don’t remember seeing him,” Adam Martin said. “I had classes with him, [which] is why I remember him.”

But Martin added that he doesn’t believe Roof was bullied at the high school.

“It wasn’t like he got picked on. The school we went to...is so diverse he just couldn’t have gotten picked on,” he said. “Everyone is so different.”

Roof’s father gave him a .45-caliber pistol for his birthday, according to uncle Charles Cowles. The uncle said he recognized Roof from the police photo and “described him as quiet and soft-spoken,” according to Reuters.

Roof’s sister, Amber, was the one who notified the police after seeing surveillance footage of her brother on the news, The Washington Post reported. Amber Roof had planned to get married Sunday, the paper reported, and her fiancé, Michael Tyo, lives just three miles from where Dylann Roof was arrested Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina.

Many of Roof’s Facebook friends, including those from his high school, are black. Another high school friend, Antonio Metze, told the AP that Roof “had black friends.”

Yet the cousin of the church’s pastor—who was killed—quoted a survivor who said Roof told the church: “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”

Photos of the aftermath of the shooting