Everything We Know About The Charleston Shooting Suspect

A portrait of the white, 21-year-old man suspected of massacring nine people Wednesday night at a historic black church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina began to emerge Thursday as those who knew him shared photos and recollections.

PEOPLE reports Roof had "chains on his legs and a bulletproof vest," as he was led out of the jail at the Shelby, North Carolina Police Department, about 245 miles from the scene of the crime.

 An assistant clerk in North Carolina says the extradition hearing for suspect in the fatal shooting of nine people at a historic black church lasted just 10 minutes, and he waived his right to counsel.

At the hearing, suspect 21-year-old Dylann Roof waived his right to extradition, which means he will be headed to South Carolina.
Cleveland County Assistant Clerk Ruth Deviney says she doesn't know when or how that will happen. She says Roof was taken from the courthouse by officers from the FBI, the Sheriff's Office and the Shelby Police. She says he's legally in the custody of the Shelby police.
Waiving his right to counsel means Roof will either represent himself or hire his own lawyer.

Roof lived with his older sister Amber and their father part-time, until his father and stepmother divorced. A profile on TheKnot.com shows that Amber Roof is scheduled to be married shows her wedding is scheduled for Sunday in Lexington, South Carolina, Reuters reported.

Dalton Tyler told ABC News that he'd known Dylann Storm Roof for about seven months to a year. Tyler told the news outlet that he last saw Roof about a week ago and knew he'd been planning something like the Charleston church attack "for six months."

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC News. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

Tyler described Roof as "on and off" with his parents, according to ABC News. Members of Roof's immediate family have not given extensive comment on his alleged crime.

A woman who on Thursday answered a cellphone belonging to Roof's mother, Amelia, told Reuters "We will be doing no interviews ever."

A reporter for the Post And Courier newspaper tweeted that a man who answered the door at Roof's Eastover, South Carolina home declined to speak with reporters and told them get off his property.

White supremacist leanings

A Facebook friend of Roof's, who goes by the name Derrick D Gutta Pearson on the social network, posted this photo of what he said was Roof and his car:

The man in the photo, who resembles Roof, sat on the hood of a black car with a front license plate reading "Confederate States of America."

An expert on domestic extremism told TPM on Thursday that there were other indicators Roof harbored white supremacist sentiments.

Mark Pitcavage, the director of investigative research for the Anti-Defamation League, said two patches on a jacket Roof was wearing in the only public photo on the Facebook page are symbols of the white supremacist movement. One patch is the flag of South Africa's Apartheid government while the other is the flag of the former white-controlled country of Rhodesia, which later became Zimbabwe, Pitcavage said.

The photo of Roof wearing the jacket with flag patches was posted late last month.

Got handgun for birthday present

The suspect was an introverted and soft-spoken young man, according to a man who identified himself as Roof's uncle in an interview with Reuters. Carson Cowles, 56, told the news service that he told Roof's mother he thought his nephew needed to get out more.

"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.

Cowles told Reuters he believed Roof's father recently gifted him a .45-caliber handgun for his birthday.

Reuters also contacted a cellphone number belonging to Roof's mother, Amelia. A woman who answered told the news service, "We will be doing no interviews ever" before hanging up the phone.

Run-ins with the law

Roof has had brushes with the law before. County records show that Roof was arrested in March on drug charges and then was detained again in late April, Columbia TV station WIS reported.

A classmate of Roof's at White Knoll High School, John Mullins, told The Daily Beast that he remembered the suspect as a "pill popper" rather than a white supremacist.

“He used drugs heavily a lot,” Mullins told the news site. “It [sic] obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”

The former classmate told The Daily Beast that he didn't think Roof was a racist so much as a conservative with a lot of "Southern Pride."

"He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that," Mullins said. "You don’t really think of it like that.”

Source Talkingpoinsmemo.com