Dylann Roof

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American white supremacist, Neo-Nazi, and mass murderer who is currently serving time on death row at USP Terre Haute for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in the U.S. state of South Carolina.

During a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured a tenth 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.

Roof's actions in Charleston have been widely described as domestic terrorism.

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 Black people, among other groups.

When Roof was five, his father married Paige Mann (née Hastings) in November 1999; they divorced after 10 years of marriage.

Roof 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 information about Roof attending local schools 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 started smoking marijuana, and was once caught spending money on it.

In nine years, Roof 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.

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.

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 working as a landscaper at the behest of his father, but quit the job prior to the shooting.

His maternal uncle, Carson Cowles, said that he expressed concern about the social withdrawal of his then-19-year-old nephew, because "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 said he tried to mentor Roof, but Roof rejected his attempts to help 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 classmate said that despite Roof's racist comments, some of his friends in school were Black.

Roof had a prior police record consisting of two arrests, both made in the months preceding the attack.

He was investigated on one occasion during this period but without arrest or charge.

He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and Black-on-white crime.

On February 28, 2015, mall security at the Columbiana Centre in Columbia called police after Roof, wearing all-black clothing, asked employees unsettling questions.

During police questioning, Roof consented to be searched, and was found to be in possession of several strips of Suboxone, a prescription medication for opioid use disorder which is sometimes sold illegally, but usually for therapeutic rather than recreational use.

As Roof did not have a valid prescription, he was arrested for a misdemeanor charge of drug possession, and was subsequently banned from the Columbiana Centre for a year.

On March 13, 2015, Roof was investigated for loitering in his parked car near a park in downtown Columbia.

He had been recognized by an off-duty police officer who investigated his March 2 questioning; the officer then called a colleague to investigate.

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.

Roof was born in Columbia, South Carolina, to Franklin Bennett Roof (nicknamed Benn), 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.