Dylann Roof Biography | Dylann Roof | Who is Dylann Roof?
Dylann Roof(full name: Dylann Storm Roof)is an American white supremacist and mass murderer convicted for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in the U.S. state of South Carolina.
During a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including a senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person.
After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the center of a manhunt that ended the morning after the shooting with his arrest in Shelby, North Carolina. He later confessed that he committed the shooting in hopes of igniting a race war.
Three days after the shooting, a website titled The Last Rhodesian was discovered and later confirmed by officials to be owned by Roof. The website contained photos of Roof posing with symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism, along with a manifesto in which he outlined his views toward blacks, among other peoples.
He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and black-on-white crime.
On December 15, 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all 33 federal charges (including hate crimes) against him stemming from the shooting; on January 11, 2017, he was sentenced to death for those crimes.
On March 31, 2017, Roof agreed to plead guilty in South Carolina state court to all state charges pending against him—nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony—to avoid a second death sentence.
In return, he accepted a sentence of life in prison without parole. On April 10, 2017, Roof was sentenced to nine consecutive sentences of life without parole after formally pleading guilty to state murder charges.
Dylann Roof Age | How old is Dylann Roof?
Dylann Storm Roof is an American white supremacist and mass murderer convicted for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in the U.S. state of South Carolina.
Dylann is 25 years old as of 2019. He was born on 3 April 1994, in Columbia, South Carolina, United States
Early life | Parents
He was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to Franklin Bennett (called Bennett) Roof, a carpenter and a construction contractor, and Amelia “Amy” Cowles, a bartender. His parents had divorced but were temporarily reconciled at the time of his birth.
When Roof was five, his father married Paige Mann (née Hastings) in November 1999; they divorced after ten years of marriage. He has two siblings, an older half-sister and a younger sister, Morgan Roof.
Bennett Roof was allegedly verbally and physically abusive toward Mann. The family mostly lived in South Carolina, though from about 2005 to 2008, they temporarily moved to the Florida Keys. There is no info concerning Roof attending native faculties there.
According to a 2009 affidavit filed for Mann’s divorce, Roof exhibited “obsessive-compulsive behavior” as he grew up, obsessing over germs and insisting on having his hair cut in a certain style. When he was in middle school, he exhibited an interest in smoking marijuana, having once been caught spending money on it.
In nine years, he attended at least seven schools in two South Carolina counties, including White Knoll High School in Lexington, in which he repeated the ninth grade, finishing it in another school.
He apparently stopped attending classes in 2010 and, according to his family, dropped out of school and spent his time alternating between playing video games and taking drugs, such as Suboxone. He was on the rolls of a local Evangelical Lutheran congregation, but it was unclear if he had recently attended.
Prior to the attack, Roof was living alternately in Bennett’s and Cowles’ homes in downtown Columbia and Hopkins, respectively, but was mostly raised by his stepmother Mann.
For several weeks preceding the attack, Roof had also been occasionally living in the home of an old friend from middle school and the latter’s mother, two brothers, and girlfriend. He allegedly spent his time using drugs and getting drunk.
He had been operating as a landscapist at the dictation of his father however quit the task before the shooting. His maternal uncle, Carson Cowles, said that he expressed concern about the social withdrawal of his then-nineteen-year-old nephew, because “he still didn’t have a job, a driver’s license or anything like that and he simply stayed in his space loads of the time.”
Cowles said he tried to mentor Roof, but was rejected and they drifted apart. According to Mann, Roof cut off all contact with her after her divorce from his father. When his sister planned to be married, he did not respond to her invitation to the event.
A former high school class fellow aforementioned that despite Roof’s racist comments, a number of his friends in class were black
Dylann Roof Sister (Morgan Roof)
He has only two sisters named Amber Roof and Morgan Roof, Morgan Roof is an American girl who is recently arrested on 14th March 2018. She was taken in for charges of carrying weapons to school and possession of drugs.
Charleston church shooting
On the evening of June month seventeen, 2015, a mass shooting materialized at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South geographical area, us.
During a routine Bible study at the church, a white man about 21 years old, later identified as Roof, opened fire with a handgun, killing nine people. The roof was unemployed and living in largely African-American Eastover at the time of the attack.
Motivation
According to a childhood friend, Roof went on a rant about the shooting of Trayvon Martin and the 2015 Baltimore protests that were sparked by the death of Freddie Gray while Gray was in police custody.
He additionally usually claimed that “blacks were absorbing the world”. Roof reportedly told friends and neighbors of his plans to kill individuals, including a plot to attack the College of Charleston, but his claims were not taken seriously.
One image from his Facebook page showed him carrying a jacket embellished with 2 obsolete flags used as emblems among Yankee supremacist movements, those of Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa.
Another on-line photograph showed Roof sitting on the hood of his automobile with a decorative registration code with a Confederate flag on that.
According to his friend, Roof expressed his support of racial segregation in the United States and had intended to start a civil war.
One of the friends who briefly hid Roof’s gun away from him said, “I don’t think the church was his primary target because he told us he was going for the school. But I feel he could not get into the varsity due to the safety … so I think he just settled for the church.”
An African-American friend of his said that he never witnessed Roof expressing any racial prejudice, but also said that a week before the shooting, Roof had confided in him that he would commit a shooting at the college.
On the day he was captured (June 18, 2015), Roof confessed to committing the Charleston attack with the intention of starting a race war and reportedly told investigators he almost did not go through with his mission because members of the church study group had been so nice to him.
Federal prosecutors said in August 2016 that Roof was “self-radicalized” online, instead of adopting his white supremacist ideology “through his personal associations or experiences with white supremacist groups or individuals or others”.
Website and handwritten documents On June 20, 2015, an internet site that had been registered to a “Dylann Roof” on Gregorian calendar month nine, 2015, lastrhodesian.com, was discovered.
Though the identity of the domain’s owner was intentionally masked the day after it was registered, law enforcement officials confirmed Roof as the owner.
The site included a cache of photos of Roof movement with a pistol and a Confederate flag, as well as with the widely recognized neo-Nazi code numbers 88 (an abbreviation for the salute “Heil Hitler! “) and 1488, written in sand.
The roof was additionally seen spit on associated burning a flag. While some photographs seemed to show Roof at home in his room, others were taken on an apparent tour of slavery-related historical sites in North and South Carolina, including Sullivan’s Island,
the largest slave disembarkation port in North America, four former plantations, two cemeteries (one for white Confederate soldiers, the other for slaves), and the Museum and Library of Confederate History in Greenville. The roof is believed to have taken self-portraits using a timer, and his visits were not remembered by staff members working at the sites.
The website also contained an unsigned, 2,444-word manifesto apparently authored by Roof, in which he outlined his opinions, all methodically broken into the following sections: “Blacks”, “Jews”, “Hispanics”, “East Asians”, “Patriotism”, and “An Explanation”: I have no choice.
I am not within the position to, alone, get in the ghetto and fight. I selected Charleston as a result of it’s a most historic town 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 somebody has got to have the bravery to require it to the $64000 world, and I guess that has to be me. The pronunciamento states that its author was “truly awakened” by coverage of the shooting of Trayvon Martin:
I browse the Wikipedia article and promptly I used to be unable to know what the large deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was within the right. But additional significantly this prompted ME to kind within the words “black on white crime” into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.
The first web site I came to was the Council of Conservative voters. There were pages upon pages of those brutal black on White murders. I was in disbelief. At this moment I noticed that one thing was terribly wrong. How might the news be berating the Trayvon Martin case whereas many these black on White murders got ignored?
The manifesto also mentioned as another source of influence the Northwest Front, a Seattle-based white supremacist organization infamous for its participation in the 1979 Greensboro massacre.
According to web server logs, Roof’s website was last modified at 4:44 p.m. on June 17, 2015, when Roof noted, “At the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”
According to court documents filed in August 2016, Roof drafted two other manifestos, one in 2015 and the other in jail, recovered from his vehicle and jail cell respectively. He also made a list of churches and a “selection of victims”, along with other writings.
Weapon purchase and FBI lapse
Roof personally purchased the gun used in the shooting from a retail gun store in West Columbia, using money given to him on his birthday. The Washington Post reported on July 10, 2015, that FBI Director James Comey said that Roof “was able to purchase the gun used in the attack only because of lapses in the FBI’s background-check system”.
One week prior to the shooting, two of his friends tried to hide the gun after Roof claimed he was going to kill people. They returned it to him after the girlfriend of one of the friends, in whose trailer they hid the gun, pointed out he was on probation and needed to have the gun out of his possession.
Prior to the shooting
FBI analysis of Roof’s confiscated radiotelephone and laptop found that he was in on-line communication with alternative white supremacists, according to unnamed officials.
Although Roof’s contacts didn’t seem to possess inspired the massacre, the investigation was said to have widened to also include other persons of interest.
The reaction by white supremacists
Although the Council of Conservative voters took down its web site on June twenty within the immediate wake of negative promotion, its president, Earl Holt, stated that the organization was “hardly responsible” for Roof’s actions.
The organization also issued a statement saying that Roof had some “legitimate grievances” against black people and that the group’s website “accurately and honestly reports a black-on-white violent crime”.
Harold Covington, the founding father of the Northwest Front, additionally condemned Roof’s actions, however, referred to as the attack “a preview of returning attractions”.
Through analysis of his manifesto, the Southern Poverty Law Center alleged that Roof was a reader and commenter on The Daily Stormer, a white nationalist news website.
Its editor Andrew Anglin “repudiated Roof’s crime and publicly disavowed violence while endorsing many of Roof’s views.” He claimed that while he would have sympathy with a white man shooting criminals, killing innocents including elderly women was “a completely insane act”.