‘He said that he wanted to st art a civilc war’
He was pure evil, lying in wait. The South Carolina man who blew away nine people in a historically black church was a drugabusing loner who told racist jokes, admired the Confederate flag — and was planning his sick rampage for months, friends and relatives said.
“He said he wanted to start a civil war,” roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News. “He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
Friends and former classmates described Dylann Storm Roof, 21, as quiet and reserved, but never shy about sharing the twisted, racist views authorities believe fueled the massacre that unfolded Wednesday night at Charleston’s Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” said Tyler, who lived with Roof in a trailer park in Lexington, SC, for about a year.
Yet early on, few recognized — or did anything about — the warning signs that might have signaled the bloodbath to come.
Roof was described as a smart, quiet child who grew up in a stable, middleclass family. He was the son of a contractor and the middle child between one full sister and one halfsister, according to The Wall Street Journal. His grandfather is C. Joseph Roof, a prominent Columbia, SC, lawyer, the paper reported.
“He didn’t grow up looking like a troubled kid or a violent kid,” said a South Carolina woman whose daughter was married to Roof’s dad and still sees her stepson.
His parents divorced many years ago, and his father — who gave his son a .45caliber handgun for his 21st birthday — and stepmother have also split up, said the former relative, who asked to remain anonymous. Then, something changed. Friends from White Knoll HS in Lexington said Roof did drugs, “like Xanax.” And they said they just shrugged it off when Roof told offensive jokes.
“He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that,” a former classmate, John Mullins, told The Daily Beast. “He had that kind of Southern pride,” Mullins said.
Roof, who attended six different schools between fourth and ninth grades, displayed a Confederate flag on the from licenseplate area of his car.
The Stars and Bars is not unusual in South Carolina — which flies the Confederate flag over a memorial near its statehouse.
The Southern Poverty Law Center, an Alabamabased civil rights group that tracks hate organizations and extremists, said that Roof was not on its radar.
Roof’s Facebook’s page — which features a list of black “friends” — also showed him scowling in a jacket bearing flags from apartheidera South Africa and from what was once white-ruled Rhodesia and is now Zimbabwe.
The two flags — as the Confederate flag is in many circles — are considered symbols of hate.
Roof repeated ninth grade and left school in 10th grade in February 2010, a spokeswoman for the Lexington County School District One, told the Journal.
“He turned into a loner in the last couple of years, and no one knew why,” she said. “He just fell off the grid somehow.”
Roof’s uncle Carson Cowles noticed a change and told his sister, Amelia — Roof’s mother, Amelia — that the “quiet, soft spoken boy” was too introverted.
“I said he was like 19 years old, he still didn’t have a job, a driver’s license or anything like that and he just stayed in his room a lot of the time,” Cowles told Reuters.
Lately, the young man’s behavior grew increasingly erratic.
Records show he was arrested Feb. 28 at the Columbiana Mall in Columbia, SC, when police responded to a call that he was harassing store workers, asking them bizarre questions about store hours and staffing.
The arresting officers found on him Suboxone, a powerful medication used to treat addiction to heroin and painkillers. It has been connected with outbursts of aggression. Police also found him with cocaine, LSD and methamphetamine, RadarOnline reported.
The mall banned Roof for a year after the incident, but he was arrested there again just two months later on a trespassing charge, according to court records.
Chris Spears, manager of the Shoe Department store, said Roof, dressed in all black, ap
proached his assistant while she was working.
“He was asking her all kinds of personal questions, wanting to know work schedules. She was busy working, and she felt uncomfortable, so she called security, and they came and got him,” Spears said.
He said Roof was “wanting to basically see how we ran things” and acted “like he was on drugs . . . really creepy.”
Roof explained it away, telling cops that he was there because his parents were pressuring him to get a job, records show.
And in recent weeks, Roof reconnected with a childhood buddy, Joseph Meek Jr., whom 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, Meek said.
Roof never talked about race years ago when they were friends, Meek said, and only recently made remarks about the killing of the unarmed black 17yearold Martin in Florida and the riots in Baltimore over the policecustody death of Freddie Gray.
“He said blacks were taking over the world,” Meek said.
“Someone needed to do something about it for the white race. 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 that when he woke up Wednesday morning, Roof was at his house, sleeping in his car out side. Later that day, Meek went to a nearby lake with a couple of other people, but Roof hated the outdoors and decided he would rather go see a movie.
It wasn’t until a surveillancecamera image of a young man with a soupbowl haircut was broadcast on television Thursday morning that he saw his friend again.
“I didn’t think it was him,” Meek said. “I knew it was him.”