COLUMBIA, S.C. — Dylann Roof spat on and burned the American flag, but waved the Confederate.
He posed for pictures wearing a No. 88 T-shirt, had 88 Facebook friends and wrote that number — white supremacist code for “Heil Hitler”— in the South Carolina sand.
A website discovered Saturday appears to offer the first serious look at Mr. Roof’s thinking, including how the case of Trayvon Martin, the black Florida teenager shot to death in 2012 by George Zimmerman, a neighborhood watch volunteer, triggered his racist rage. The site shows a stash of 60 photographs, many of them of Mr. Roof at Confederate heritage sites or slavery museums, and includes a nearly 2,500-word manifesto in which the author criticized blacks as being inferior while lamenting the cowardice of white flight.
“I have no choice,” it reads. “I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me.”
It is not clear whether the manifesto was written by Mr. Roof or if he had control of it. Nor is it clear whether he took the pictures with a timer, or if someone else took them. In a joint statement Saturday night, the Charleston Police Department and the F.B.I. said they were aware of the website and were “taking steps to verify the authenticity of these postings.”
If it is genuine, as his friends seem to think, the tourist sites he visited, the pictures that were posted and the hate-filled words on the site offered a chilling glimpse into the interests of an unemployed former landscaper said to have a fixation on race.
“This whole racist thing came into him within the past five years,” said Caleb Brown, a childhood friend of Mr. Roof’s who is half black. “He was never really popular; he accepted that. He wasn’t like: ‘When I grow up I am going to show all these kids.’ He accepted who he was, and who he was changed, obviously.”
Mr. Roof’s friends say that he only spoke of his murderous plans once — when he recently warned that he planned to do something crazy with the gun he had purchased with the money he got from his parents for his 21st birthday. But they say his sense of racial grievance began with the Trayvon Martin case.
The website, the lastrhodesian.com, which was not working by Saturday afternoon, featured a photo of a bloodied dead white man on the floor. The picture appears to be an image from “Romper Stomper,” an Australian movie about neo-Nazis. The domain name is a reference to the white minority of what is now Zimbabwe, where whites fought blacks for 15 years and enlisted white supremacists as mercenaries.
The site was first discovered by a blogger who goes by the pen name Emma Quangel, who paid $49 for a reverse domain search that turned up the site.
According to web server logs, the manifesto was last modified at 4:44 p.m. Eastern time on Wednesday, the day of the Charleston shootings, and the essay notes, “at the time of writing I am in a great hurry.”
In the manifesto, Mr. Roof writes: “The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case. I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up. I read the Wikipedia article and right away I was unable to understand what the big deal was. It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right. But more importantly this prompted me to type in the words ‘black on White crime’ into Google, and I have never been the same since that day.”
The manifesto also says he learned from the website of the far-right Council of Conservative Citizens. The council is an offshoot of a 1950s-era organization that fought school desegregation. A message on its website says the group is “deeply saddened by the Charleston killing spree.”
Dylann Roof Photos and a Manifesto Are Posted on Website
Posted By: Steve Williams
Sunday, June 21st 2015 at 7:39AM
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