Suspect ‘wanted segregation,’ childhood friend says
LEXINGTON, S.C. — In recent weeks, Dylann Roof reconnected with a childhood buddy he hadn’t seen in five years and started railing about the Trayvon Martin case, about black people “taking over the world” and about the need for “the white race” to do something about it, the friend said Thursday.
Joseph Meek Jr. said he and Roof had been best friends in middle school, but lost touch when Roof moved away about five years ago. The two reconnected a few weeks ago.
Roof never talked about race years ago when they were friends, but recently made remarks out of the blue about the killing of unarmed black 17-yearold Trayvon Martin in Florida and the riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, Meek said.
“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.”
Some other friends interviewed 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.”
Roof used to skateboard while growing up in the Lexington area and had long hair then. He attended high school in Lexington and in Columbia from 2008 to 2010, school officials said.
“He was pretty smart,” Metze said.
Meek’s mother, Kimberly Konzny, said she and her son instantly recognized Roof in the surveillance camera image after the shooting because Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing video games in their home. He had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said.
“I don’t know what was going through his head,” she said. “He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends.”
State court records for Roof as an adult show a felony drug case from March that was pending against him and a misdemeanour trespassing charge from April.
His Facebook profile picture showed him wearing a jacket with a green-and-white flag patch, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, which became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the era of white minority rule that ended in the 1990s.
Charleston Mayor Joseph Riley Jr. Thursday called the shooting deaths of nine people in Charleston, S.C., “pure, pure concentrated evil.”