Dylann Storm Roof[1] (born April 3, 1994) is an American white supremacist, neo-Nazi mass murderer who perpetrated the Charleston church shooting.

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.

[15] 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.

[28][29] 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.

A police officer conducted a search of his vehicle and found a forearm grip for an AR-15 semiautomatic rifle and six unloaded magazines, all capable of holding 40 rounds.

[20][27][34] According to James Comey, speaking in July 2015, Roof's February arrest was at first written as a felony, which would have required an inquiry into the charge during a firearms background examination.

[35][36] On the evening of June 17, 2015, a mass shooting took place at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in downtown Charleston, South Carolina.

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.

[41][23] One image from his Facebook page showed him wearing a jacket decorated with two obsolete flags used as emblems among American white supremacist movements, those of Rhodesia (present-day Zimbabwe) and apartheid-era South Africa.

[48] On the day he was captured (June 18, 2015), Roof confessed to committing the Charleston attack with the intention of starting a race war,[49] and reportedly told investigators he almost did not go through with the shooting because members of the church study group had been so nice to him.

[7] The site included a cache of photos of Roof posing with a handgun and a Confederate Battle Flag, as well as with the widely recognized neo-Nazi code numbers 88 (an abbreviation for the salute "Heil Hitler!")

[54] The website also contained an unsigned, 2,444-word manifesto apparently authored by Roof,[55][56] in which he outlined his opinions, all methodically broken into the following sections: "Blacks", "Jews", "Hispanics", "East Asians", "Patriotism", and "An Explanation":[53] I have no choice.

[6]The manifesto states that its author was "truly awakened" by coverage of the killing of Trayvon Martin: I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was.

[67] Although the Council of Conservative Citizens took down its website on June 20 in the immediate wake of negative publicity,[53] its president, Earl Holt, stated that the organization was "hardly responsible" for Roof's actions.

[57] 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 report[s] black-on-white violent crime".

[37][74] At 10:44 a.m., on the morning after the attack, Roof was captured in a traffic stop in Shelby, North Carolina, approximately 245 miles (394 km) from the shooting scene.

She recognized Roof driving his car, a black Hyundai Elantra with South Carolina license plates and a three-flag "Confederate States of America" bumper decoration,[77][78] on U.S. Route 74, recalling security camera images taken at the church and distributed to the media.

[83] An unidentified source said interrogations with Roof after his arrest determined he had been planning the attack for around six months, researched Emanuel AME Church, and targeted it because of its role in African American history.

[84][85][86] At the jail, his cell-block neighbor was Michael Slager, the former North Charleston officer charged with first-degree murder in the wake of his shooting of Walter Scott.

[95] A temporary gag order was issued by a judge on July 14 following the appearance of a letter purportedly written by Roof on an online auction site.

[101][102] On September 3, Ninth Circuit solicitor (district attorney) Scarlett Wilson said that she intended to seek the death penalty for Roof because more than two people were killed in the shooting and others' lives were put at risk.

[115] The judge denied that motion after the prosecution (whose consent is required for a bench trial under the rules that apply to federal criminal proceedings) opposed Roof's request.

[118] On September 6, 2016, federal prosecutors filed a motion seeking to bar Roof's attorneys from asking the jurors for mercy during sentencing should he be found guilty of the charges against him.

[133][134][135] On December 4, 2016, Roof, in a handwritten request, asked Gergel to give him back his defense team for the guilt phase of his federal death penalty trial.

[154] Ballenger wrote that Roof blocked his attorneys from introducing any evidence of autism or other disorders, as well as various delusions,[153] at trial because he did not want "any issue to take away from the rationale he had for committing his crimes" because he felt that "his reputation was ruined, ...

"[153] Ballenger concluded that: "all of his decisions in the trial are dominated and driven by his primary racial prejudice and wish to preserve that as the sole rationale for his crimes and to protect his long term image and reputation as someone who has no mental illness.

In the 321-page motion, his attorneys argue that he had disorders ranging from schizophrenia spectrum to autism, anxiety and depression, and that he did not care about his sentence, in the belief that white nationalists would rescue him from prison after an impending race war.

Upholding the death sentence, the judges wrote in their 149-page opinion that "no cold record or careful parsing of statutes and precedents can capture the full horror of what Roof did.

[176][177] In December 2024, when President Joe Biden announced commutations for the death sentences of 37 out of 40 federal death row inmates to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole, he excluded Roof, along with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev who committed the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing and Robert Gregory Bowers who committed the 2018 Pittsburgh synagogue shooting because of their convictions for either terrorism or hate-motivated mass murder related crimes.