Dylann Storm Roof had connections to South Africa, Zimbabwe.
By Raif Karerat
WASHINGTON, DC: The 21-year-old white gunman who is suspected of slaughtering 9 people at a historically black Charleston, S.C. church has been taken into custody, local news outlets reported Thursday, just before noon local time.
Law enforcement arrested 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof of Eastover in Shelby, N.C. on Thursday morning, according to NBC affiliate WIS. Shelby, which is west of Charlotte, is approximately 245 miles from the shooting scene. Police said he fled the scene of the atrocity by car just after 9 p.m. on Wednesday night.
Law enforcement officials are classifying the multiple-homicide as a hate crime. The Justice Department also announced it is opening a parallel civil rights investigation into the case, reported the NBC News national bureau.
Supporting the allegation of racially motivated murder is a photo posted to Roof’s Facebook account in which he appears to be wearing the flags of two African countries when they were ruled by Caucasians: on top, Apartheid-era South Africa , and below it, the flag of white-dominated Rhodesia, which is now known as Zimbabwe, according to ThinkProgess.
While the manhunt intensified Thursday morning leading up to his capture, Roof’s uncle told Reuters that he recognized the man in surveillance photos from the Emanuel AME Church as his nephew.
“The more I look at him, the more I’m convinced that’s him,” said Carson Cowles, 56.
Cowles also stated Roof had recently been given a .45-caliber handgun as a birthday present by his father and that the 21-year-old had seemed adrift.
Speaking just before noon on Thursday, Mayor Joe Riley of Charleston said that the “awful person, that terrible human being who would go into a place of worship where people were praying and kill them, is now in custody where he will always remain,” reported The Guardian in their live feed covering the tragedy.
“The arrest of this man, he said, “[is] important for everyone wounded by this act, which of the church family members, community members, and people of America.”