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Daily Beast: Dylann Storm Roof has reportedly confessed to killing nine people at a historic black church in Charleston because he hoped it would start a “race war.” The 21-year-old from Lexington, South Carolina, was taken into custody in Shelby, North Carolina...and later told police that he himself bought the handgun he used in the shooting in April, according to law-enforcement sources...
John Mullins, who went to high school with Roof...remembers him as being “kind of wild...He used drugs heavily a lot...It was obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”
On February 28, Roof was...searched by officers...at a mall in Columbia (South Carolina)...after storekeepers complained that he was acting unusually and asking questions about opening hours and the number of staff on the premises...Roof was found to have strips of Suboxone, a pain drug sometimes used to treat opiate addiction. He did not have a prescription for the drug, which is commonly sold illegally on the street...He was charged with trespassing on April 26...found guilty on that charge a month later and fined...
Joseph Meek Jr...(a) best friend (in) middle school...says Roof had begun ranting about the murders of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray...“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.”
...Roommate Dalton Tyler told ABC News that Roof was “planning something like that for six months...He was big into segregation and other stuff...He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself."
...A sparse Facebook page, now taken down, showed an image of Roof apparently flaunting his belief in white supremacy by wearing a jacket with the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and white-ruled Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe), which fought a bitter civil war against black majority rule...
Many of Roof’s Facebook friends, including those from his high school, are black...Christon Scriven, a friend...who is black...told the New York Daily News...“He flat out told us he was going to do this stuff...He was looking to kill a bunch of people.” He and their other friends assumed he had been joking. “He’s weird. You don’t know when to take him seriously and when not to,” he said.
Roof’s sister, Amber...had planned to get married Sunday...(H)er fiancé, Michael Tyo, lives just three miles from where Dylann Roof was arrested Thursday in North Carolina.
Yet the cousin of the church’s pastor—who was killed—quoted a survivor who said Roof told the church: “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”
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WHNT.com: Police had said earlier that Roof, of Lexington, South Carolina, may have been driving a black Hyundai...He was arrested after a traffic stop prompted by a tip from a citizen, police said.
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His father should be charged as an accomplice for supplying him with the gun -- even if he didn't know about the drug arrest, he should have known about his son's high school drug problem.
Charleston is two hours south of Lexington; Shelby NC is nearly 4 hours north of Charleston. Which has me wondering about the nationality of his brother-in-law-to-be: if his sister wasn't marrying a white man, that could be part of his motive, too -- was Tyo to be Roof's next target? It would explain why he didn't kill himself.