Dylann Roof

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American mass murderer, white supremacist, and neo-Nazi who perpetrated the Charleston church shooting. During a Bible study on June 17, 2015, at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, Roof murdered nine people and injured a tenth; the victims were African Americans, and included Clementa C. Pinckney, who was the church's senior pastor and a state senator. 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 picture of him wearing a jacket containing the flags of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, and a manifesto in which he outlined his views toward Black people, among other groups. 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 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....