Website a look at suspect’s mind
Manifesto, photos shared before church murders.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American flag, but waved the Confederate battle flag.
He posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends and wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler” — in the South Carolina sand.
A website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, triggered his racist rage.
The site shows a stash of 6 0 photographs of Roof, many at Confederate heritage sites or slavery museums, and includes a racist manifesto in which the author criticized blacks as being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of white flight.
“I have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
The website was registered Feb. 9 in the name of Dylann Roof, the 21-yearold man charged with entering a black church in Charleston on Wednesday night, attending a prayer meeting for an hour and then murdering nine parishioners. The day after the site was registered, the registration information was intentionally masked.
It is not clear whether the manifesto was written by Roof or if he had control of it. Nor is it clear whether he took the pictures with a timer, or if someone else took them. The FBI and Charleston police officials say they are examining the site.
But if it is genuine, as his friends seem to think, the tourist sites he visited, the pictures that were posted and the hate-filled words filling the site offered a chilling glimpse into the interests of an unemployed high school dropout said to have a fixation on race and a murderous rage.
“This whole racist thing came into him within the past five years,” said Caleb Brown, a childhood friend of Roof’s who is half-black. “He was never really popular; he accepted that. He wasn’t like, ‘When I grow up I am going to show all these kids.’ He accepted who he was, and who he was changed, obviously.”
Roof, who is accused of being the lone gunman who entered the Emanuel AME Church Wednesday night and unleashed a murderous rampage with a .45-caliber handgun, has been charged with nine counts of murder in connection with the killings. Victims included the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was both the church pastor and a state senator.
Roof, who was first identified by surveillance footage released the morning after the killings, is being held at the Charleston County jail, along with a North Charleston police officer charged with shooting an unarmed AfricanAmerican motorist in the back in April.
Roof’s friends say that he only spoke of his racist leanings once — when he recently warned that he planned to do something crazy with the gun he had purchased with the money he got from his parents for his 21st birthday. But they say he was bothered by the uproar surrounding the Trayvon Martin case.
The website, lastrhodesian.com, features a photo of a bloodied dead white man on the floor. The picture appears to be a shot from “Romper Stomper,” an Australian movie about neo-Nazis. It was first discovered by a blogger who goes by the pen name Emma Quangel.
The blogger was inspired by another Twitter user to pay $49 for a reverse domain search that turned up the site.
According to web server logs, the manifesto was last modified at 4:44 p.m. Eastern Standard Time on Wednesday, the day of the Charleston shootings, and the essay notes: “at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”
The manifesto says: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was,” the essay says. “It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”
The account cites the website of the far-right Council of Conservative Citizens as a site he learned from.
A friend of Roof’s, Jacob Meek, 15, said the references to the Trayvon Martin case made it clear that Roof had written the essay.
Watchdog groups that track right-wing extremism say the manifesto reflects the language found in white supremacist forums online and dovetails with what has been said about Roof thus far — that he had self-radicalized, and that he did not belong to a particular hate group. “It’s clear that he was extremely receptive to those ideas,” said Mark Pitcavage, director of the Anti-Defamation League’s Center on Extremism. “At the same time, he does not have a sophisticated knowledge of white supremacy.”