Dylann Storm Roof, center, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C. Photo / Chuck Burton
Dylann Storm Roof, center, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C. Photo / Chuck Burton
Dylann Roof was a quiet boy who as a teen developed an obsession with racist regimes.
The man suspected of massacring nine people in an historic African American church in South Carolina had been planning an attack for six months and wanted to spark a civil war, says his roommate.
Witnesses said Dylann Storm Roof, 21, told his victims, "you rape our women and you're taking over our country" before opening fire. They said he had been sitting alongside them for about an hour in a Bible study at Emanuel AME church in Charleston before rising to carry out the slaughter.
Dalton Tyler, the roommate, described Roof as a committed segregationist who had been "planning something like that for six months".
"He was big into segregation and other stuff," Tyler told ABC News.
He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.
Roof is now in police custody and is expected to face murder charges.
He was extradited to Charleston yesterday from Shelby, North Carolina, where he was arrested after a driver spotted him and phoned police.
Debbie Dills, the caller, said she had pulled up alongside another car, and noticed that the hair cut and facial features of the driver resembled the suspect who had been shown on the news.
Police arrived just minutes later, and took Roof into custody.
They said Roof surrendered without a struggle and had been "co-operative". His next appearance will be a bond hearing overnight.
Joseph Riley, the mayor of Charleston, pledged that Roof would never again be a free man.
"That awful person. That terrible human being who would go into a place of worship where people were praying and kill them is now in custody where he will always remain," he said.
Meanwhile, one of Roof's uncles gave an insight into the suspect's upbringing.
Roof grew up in the rural town of Gaston on the distant fringe of South Carolina's state capital, a quiet, shy boy who mostly kept to himself. His uncle, Carson Cowles, said he didn't get into trouble and he didn't especially stand out.
At some point that changed, and Roof's slow, aimless walk into adolescence veered off its lightly marked path.
Roof, 21, was arrested Thursday in the slayings of several people Wednesday. Photo / Chuck Burton
He dropped out of high school after ninth grade and didn't return, drifting anonymously without the apparent moorings of common teenage interests.
By this year, under pressure from his parents to get a job, he was hanging around a local mall, asking shopkeepers at what time their stores opened and closed in an unsettling ritual that eventually drew the attention of police. Then, a few months ago, Roof was arrested on drug charges as he slipped toward his alleged horrific Thursday evening visit to the Emanuel AME Church about 160km southeast of Gaston in Charleston.
Nothing had prepared his family for the shock of the crime and the images, on television screens and websites, of a son, nephew and brother who overnight had become the target of a nationwide manhunt that ended during a traffic stop in Shelby.
"The whole world is going to be looking at his family who raised this monster," Cowles said yesterday as he wiped away tears outside his mobile home in Gaston.
Although Roof was quiet and "did stay a lot to himself", Cowles said, his mother "never raised him to be like this". Cowles yesterday said his nephew had no issues with African-Americans. But the accounts of law enforcement officials and some of Roof's own possessions appeared to indicate otherwise.
His Facebook profile shows a picture of Roof in the woods, wearing a jacket with two conspicuous patches - old flags of former regimes in South Africa and Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where white minorities governed majority-black populations through racist laws and brutality.
For American white supremacists, apartheid South Africa and renegade Rhodesia have often stood as cautionary tales of what happens when whites relinquish their political power.
Roof also invoked his own country's racial history with the emblems he chose to display.
His car featured a licence plate decorated with the Confederate flag, said a law enforcement official and one of Roof's friends.
Roof, who lived in Eastover, not far from Columbia, also had an apparent affinity for guns.
Law enforcement officials said his father had either recently bought him a gun as a present or given him money that he used to buy one.
Even as he described Roof as a quiet young man who kept out of trouble, Cowles shook with anger at the thought that his nephew could have carried out the crime with which he is accused.
"I'd be the executioner myself if they would allow it," he said.
