Accused killer had previous police encounters
Roof was captured by police in Shelby, N.C., after an all-night, all-morning manhunt.
In April, he was arrested on charges of trespassing at the Columbiana Mall in Columbia, S.C. That came two months after he was banned from the mall after a police officer said he found Roof in possession of a narcotic there.
Roof published racist Web site before the massacre
Roof's apparent Facebook profile photo carries a possible indicator of his racist worldview. The picture shows Roof wearing a jacket with at least two conspicuous patches depicting old flags of racist, white-minority regimes in southern Africa.
Authorities said he left a racist manifesto targeting blacks, Jews and Hispanics on his Web site, a white supremacist broadside that also appears to offer a rationale for the shootings.
Among the 60 photos on the Web site is one of Roof on a beach with the number 1488 written in the sand. According to the Anti-Defamation League, 14 and 88 are a combination of numeric symbols used by white supremacists.
There also are more provocative images, such as Roof wearing all black and standing on an African burial site, burning an American flag or holding a Confederate flag.
The shooting occurred at a historic African American church
The historic church near Marion Square in downtown Charleston was established in 1816 and is among the oldest African American churches in the country. As the oldest African American congregation south of Baltimore, the church was a rallying point in the 1960s for Civil Rights leaders, who regularly visited the pulpit and led marches from the church steps.
Slaying happened during a Bible study session and is being investigated as a hate crime
Survivors said the shooter sat in the back of the church for about an hour during a prayer service and Bible study. At around 9 p.m., he yelled racial epithets and began to methodically shoot the nine victims, including Pastor Clementa Pinckney. Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said Roof was arrested during a traffic stop in Shelby, N.C., about 250 miles from Charleston.
Dylann Roof in an image from CCTV footage released by the Charleston Police Department (Charleston Police Department/Reuters)
Nine people died in the shooting
Six female and three male victims were killed, police said. Authorities released the names of the victims at a 3 p.m. press conference. Read their stories here.
- Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45
- Cynthia Hurd, 54
- Susie Jackson, 87
- Ethel Lance, 70
- DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49
- Myra Thompson, 59
- Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, 41
- Tywanza Sanders, 26
- Daniel Simmons, 74
The shooting took place on the southern edge of an area called the Neck, where many of Charleston’s black residents live
Census tracts just to the north of the affluent downtown area that were almost exclusively black in 1990 have become more diverse. Tracts farther away from downtown, to the north and west, now have a higher percentage of black residents.
Percentage of black population:
Race is behind nearly half of all hate crimes in the U.S.
A breakdown of the 5,922 single-bias hate crimes reported in 2013, according to the FBI's Hate Crime Statistics report:
Charleston's is not one of the deadliest shootings
Six of the 13 deadliest shootings in modern American history have occurred in the past eight years, including the massacres at Virginia Tech University in Blacksburg and at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn.