SHELBY, N.C. — Debbie Dills says she was going to work on Thursday morning when she pulled up next to a car and saw something that caught her eye.
His hair caught her eye, she said later, but she continued driving and pulled off of Interstate 74 to continue on to her job as a florist at Frady’s Florist in Kings Mountain. But she decided she had to do something.
That hair, and that car, had been all over the news in the hours before Dills got into her car. Police had released photos of Dylann Roof and said he had opened fire inside a Charleston, S.C., church, gunning down nine parishioners gathered in the building.
“Those people were doing what I had just done,” Dills said in an interview Thursday. She was at her church, the West Cramerton Baptist Church in Gastonia, on Wednesday night. “They were studying his word, that is what they were there to do, and they lost their lives doing that.”

(Ken Otterbourg for The Washington Post)
Dills called her boss Todd Frady, and got back on the road, driving about 10 miles down I-74 before catching up to him. She and Frady eventually got onto a three-way phone call with the Shelby Police Department, she said, and she got close enough to the car to get the tag number.
A short time later, Dills said, the police told her they had the situation under control, and she turned around to go to work.
Before Dills got back to work, though, Frady called her to tell her the news: Police had arrested Roof in Shelby.
The Shelby Police Department did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment Thursday. But when Gregory Mullen, the Charleston police chief, announced the arrest on Thursday morning, he pointed to one tip in particular, saying that Roof was captured after a citizen saw something suspicious and called the police.
— Ken Otterbourg