New details have emerged about 21-year old Dylann Roof, the man who police suspect [3] was behind a shooting in a historic Charleston, South Carolina church that left 9 dead on Wednesday evening.
Roof, who was arrested at a traffic stop in North Carolina earlier today, was "big into segregation" and said he "wanted to start a civil war," roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC [4]. Tyler also said Roof had been planning "something like" what happened at the church and indicated he would kill himself once it was over.
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Roof reportedly spent nearly an hour with the bible study group at Emanuel AME church before opening fire and killing three men and six women. The victims, according to ABC [6], are Rev. Clementa Pinckney -- a church pastor and a South Carolina state senator. Six other victims were identified as Rev. Sharonda Singleton, retired pastor Dr. Daniel L. Simmons, Ethel Lee Lance, Cynthia Hurd, Myra Thompson and recent college graduate Tywanza Sanders.
Roof was arrested on February 28 at a mall in Columbia, South Carolina where police were called after he asked Bed, Bath & Beyond employees a series of "out of the ordinary" questions. When police searched him, they found suboxone strips for which he could not produce a prescription. Roof was banned from the mall for a year, but returned two months later and was arrested for trespassing. The police report from the first incident is embedded below.
Here's a bit of color from NPR that sheds some light [7] on Roof's general outlook:
An undated Facebook photograph of Roof shows him wearing a jacket with two patches. One is a pre-apartheid-era flag of South Africa, and the other is the flag for Rhodesia, the previously white-ruled country now called Zimbabwe.
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The Daily News has more [9] on the events that transpired in the lead up to the shooting:
The suspected gunman who massacred nine people inside a historic black South Carolina church Wednesday got a gun for his 21st birthday in April and bragged last week about his plans to "kill a bunch of people," sources said.
The 21-year-old suspected gunman told his friends at the trailer park last week that he wanted to kill people at a local college — but no one took him seriously because of his deadpan sense of humor, his friend Christon Scriven told the Daily News.
"He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff," said Scriven. Roof moved close to the Lexington, S.C., trailer park about two months ago, he said.
Last Wednesday — exactly one week before the Charleston church massacre — Roof told his friends and neighbors at the park that "he was looking to kill a bunch of people on Wednesday" at the College of Charleston, Scriven said.
The friends assumed Roof, known for his dry sense of humor, was joking.
“He’s weird. You don’t know when to take him seriously and when not to,” said Scriven, who is black.
The College of Charleston said Roof had no connection to the public university.
Meanwhile, Roof's uncle Carson Cowles said Roof's dad gave him a .45 caliber gun for his 21st birthday in April — a present that delighted the shy, quiet Roof. Cowles talked to him a day later.
"He said, 'I got to go, I'm outside shooting target practice right now,'" he said. "He sounded happy about it."
[10]
