Twenty-one-year-old Dylann Storm Roof, the white suspect in the shooting deaths of 9 at a historically black church in Charleston, S.C. Wednesday night, was taken into police custody Thursday in Shelby, North Carolina.
Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said a citizen’s tip led police to Roof’s arrest and that he was “cooperative,” but refused to comment on whether Roof had weapons with him or admitted to the shooting.
Roof has two previous arrests: an April 26 arrest for trespassing and a March 3 arrest possession of a controlled substance, Reuters reports.
Another Facebook photo shows an unsmiling Roof sitting astride a car with a custom “Confederate States of America” license plate.
White Knoll High School, the school Roof attended, had a diverse mix of students, and many of Roof’s Facebook friends were black. A survivor of the shooting said Roof told the church: “I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”
“He used drugs heavily a lot” and was “kind of wild,” John Mullins, who went to high school with Roof, told the Daily Beast. He said the drugs Mullins took were “harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”
Mullins says Roof “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.”
Roof “flat out told us he was going to do this stuff,” friend Christon Scriven, told the New York Daily News. Scriven, who is black, added: “He’s weird. You don’t know when to take him seriously and when not to.”
Other high school friends described Roof as unmemorable and “nondescript,” while his uncle Carson Cowles described him as “quiet and soft-spoken,” according to Reuters. Neighbors interviewed by the New York Times seemed to agree with these characterizations.
Shane Hampton, a construction worker, looked across the road to where Roof lived and said, “The crazy dude lived right across the street?”
The cashier at the store across the street from Roof’s house, Kim Fleming, said: “He looks familiar. I know he’s been here. But I don’t remember what he bought.”
Roof received a .45-caliber pistol from his father for his birthday, according to uncle Charles Cowles, which he practiced using. Hours before Roof’s capture, Cowles described his quiet nephew as “a monster.”
