Suspect wore colours of a supremacist
Friends say racist leanings came as a shock I never thought he’d do something like this
CHARLESTON, S.C. • Dylann Storm Roof drove around with a Confederate flag on his licence plate — not exactly an unusual sight in the South. But on his Facebook page, he wore a jacket with the flags of the former white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.
A picture began to emerge Thursday of the 21-yearold white man arrested in the shooting deaths of nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic black church in Charleston. Although the Wednesday night attack was decried by stunned community leaders and politicians as a hate crime, some friends said they did not know him to be racist.
“I never thought he’d do something like this,” said high school friend Antonio Metze, 19. “He had black friends.”
A young man with a blunt soup-bowl haircut, Roof used to skateboard in a suburb of Lexington, S.C., when he was younger and had long hair.
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 added. “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 and a misdemeanour trespassing charge from April.
Roof attended high school in Lexington and in Columbia in 2008-10. It was not clear whether he graduated.
“He was pretty smart,” Metze said. “I can’t believe he’d do something like it.”
Roof displayed a Confederate flag on his front licence plate, Konzny said.
The man’s Facebook profile picture also showed him wearing a jacket with a green-andwhite flag patch, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, the African country that became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the apartheid era.
In Montgomery, Ala., Richard Cohen, president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, said that Roof was not known to the group and that it is unclear whether he had any connection to any of the 16 white supremacist organizations the SPLC has identified as operating in South Carolina. But Cohen said based on Roof’s Facebook page, he appeared to be a “disaffected white supremacist.”
He added the church attack is a reminder the threat of homegrown extremism is “very real.” Since 2000, the SPLC has seen an increase in the number of U.S. hate groups. “(This) has been driven by a backlash to the country’s increasing racial diversity, an increase symbolized for many by the presence of an African-American in the White House,” he said.