White suspect caught in killing of 9 in historic black church

A young man with a blunt sugar-bowl haircut, Roof used to skateboard in a Lexington suburb in South Carolina when he was younger and had long hair then.

Childhood friend Joey Meek had seen him as recently as Tuesday, said Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny. She said she didn’t know why he was in Charleston and was not aware of his being involved in any church groups or saying anything racist.

“I don’t know what was going through his head,” Konzny said. “He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.”

Joey Meek alerted the FBI after he and his mother instantly recognized Roof in a surveillance camera image that was widely circulated after the shooting.

In the image, Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox video games in their home recently, Konzny said. It was stained because he had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said.

State court records for Roof as an adult show a felony drug case from March that was pending against him and a misdemeanor trespassing charge from April. Authorities had no immediate details. As for any earlier offenses, juvenile records are generally sealed in South Carolina.

Court records list no attorney for him.

Roof displayed a Confederate flag on his front license plate, Konzny said.

His Facebook profile picture showed him wearing a jacket with a green-and-white flag patch stitched on it, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, the African country that became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the era of white minority rule that ended in the 1990s.

Roof attended ninth grade at White Knoll High during the 2008-09 school year and went there for the first half of the following academic year, district spokeswoman Mary Beth Hill said. The school system gave no reason for Roof’s departure and said it had no record of him attending any other schools in the district.

“He was pretty smart, though,” Metze said. “I can’t believe he’d do something like it.”

In Montgomery, Alabama, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center said the church attack is a reminder of the dangers of homegrown extremism.

CHARLESTON, S.C. — It was an act of “pure, pure concentrated evil,” Charleston’s mayor said — a black community’s leading lights extinguished by gunfire, allegedly at the hands of a young white man who sat among them through an hour of prayer. And so the nine victims at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church joined the ever-lengthening list of America’s racial casualties.

In one blow, the gunman ripped out part of South Carolina’s civic heart: a state senator who doubled as the church’s minister, three other pastors, a regional library manager, a high school coach and speech therapist, a government administrator, a college enrollment counselor and a recent college graduate. Six women and three men who felt called to open their church to all and, authorities said, welcomed the gunman into their Bible study.

Police arrested Dylann Storm Roof, a 21-year-old who complained that “blacks were taking over the world” and that “someone needed to do something about it for the white race,” according to a friend who alerted the FBI.

Roof waived extradition from North Carolina and was put on a plane Thursday afternoon, authorities said.

President Barack Obama called the tragedy yet another example of damage wreaked on America by guns. NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said “there is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people.” Others bemoaned the loss to a church that has served as a bastion of black power for 200 years, despite efforts by white supremacists to wipe it out.

“Of all cities, in Charleston, to have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained,” said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. “We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family.”

Surveillance video had captured the gunman entering the church Wednesday night, and Charleston County Coroner Rae Wilson said he initially didn’t appear threatening.

“The suspect entered the group and was accepted by them, as they believed that he wanted to join them in this Bible study,” she said. Then, “he became very aggressive and violent.”

Roof’s childhood friend, Joey Meek, called the FBI after recognizing him in the surveillance footage, down to the stained sweatshirt he had been wearing while playing Xbox videogames in Meek’s home the morning of the attack. “I didn’t THINK it was him. I KNEW it was him,” Meek told The Associated Press after being interviewed by investigators.

Roof was arrested without incident Thursday in North Carolina. His previous record includes a felony drug charge and a misdemeanor trespassing charge.

Roof wasn’t known to the Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, and it’s not clear whether he had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina, but he appears to be a “disaffected white supremacist,” based on his Facebook page, said the center’s president, Richard Cohen.

Meek said he and Roof had been best friends in middle school, where “he was just a quiet kid who flew under the radar.” Roof then disappeared and showed up again several weeks ago, seeming even more quiet and withdrawn.

But on his Facebook page, Roof displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes, posing with a Confederate flags plate on his car and wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe, and apartheid-era South Africa. And when Meek asked what was troubling Roof, “he started talking about race,” the friend said.

Spilling blood inside a black church — especially this one, founded in 1816 –evoked painful memories nationwide, a reminder that black churches so often have been the targets of racist violence.

A founder of the Emanuel church, Denmark Vesey, was hanged after trying to organize a slave revolt in 1822, and white landowners burned the church in revenge, leaving parishioners to worship underground until after the Civil War. The rebuilt church returned stronger, eventually winning campaigns for voting rights and political representation.

Its lead pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney — among the dead — recalled his church’s history in a 2013 sermon, saying “we don’t see ourselves as just a place where we come to worship, but as a beacon and as a bearer of the culture.”

“What the church is all about,” Pinckney said, is the “freedom to be fully what God intends us to be and have equality in the sight of God. And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that.”

Pinckney, 41, was a married father of two and a Democrat who spent 19 years in the South Carolina legislature after he was first elected at 23, becoming the youngest member of the House.

“He had a core not many of us have,” said Sen. Vincent Sheheen, who sat beside him in the Senate. “I think of the irony that the most gentle of the 46 of us — the best of the 46 of us in this chamber — is the one who lost his life.”

The other victims were Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; and the reverends DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Sharonda Singleton, 45; and Daniel Simmons Sr., 74.

While Pinckney was preaching inclusion, Roof was becoming an avowed racist, Meek told the AP.

“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,” Meek said.

U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the attack would be investigated as a hate crime.

Obama, who personally knew the slain pastor, was one of the few politicians to call for stricter gun control.

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times,” the president said. “At some point, we as a country will have to reckon with the fact that this type of mass violence does not happen in other advanced countries.”

This shooting “should be a warning to us all that we do have a problem in our society,” said state Rep. Wendell Gilliard, a Democrat whose district includes the church. “There’s a race problem in our country. There’s a gun problem in our country. We need to act on them quickly.”

A few bouquets of flowers tied to a police barricade outside the church formed a small but growing memorial. The attack came two months after the fatal shooting of an unarmed black man, Walter Scott, by a white police officer increased racial tensions in neighboring North Charleston. That shooting prompted South Carolina to pass a law, co-sponsored by Pinckney, to equip police statewide with body cameras.