Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American mass murderer and white supremacist convicted of perpetrating the June 17, 2015, Charleston church shooting. During a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person. 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.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 manifesto in which he outlined his views towards blacks, among other peoples. He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and "black-on-white crime." In December 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all 33 federal hate crime charges against him stemming from the shooting; he was sentenced to death for those crimes the following month. Roof is also awaiting trial in South Carolina state court on nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony.
On August 4, 2016, Roof was reportedly beaten by a black inmate while detained at the Charleston County Detention Center. Roof, who suffered hits and bruising to the face and body, was not seriously injured, and he was allowed to return to his cell after being examined by jail medical personnel. The inmate was identified as 25-year-old Dwayne Marion Stafford, who was awaiting trial on charges of first-degree assault and strong-arm robbery. Stafford was able to exit his unlocked cell, get through a steel cell door with a narrow vertical window, and go down the stairs into the jail's protective custody unit to reach Roof. At the time of the attack, Roof was alone after two detention officers assigned to be with him left, one being on break and the other called away to do another task. Roof and his attorney have stated that they do not plan on pressing charges. The night after the attack, eighteen months after his initial arrest, Stafford was released on over $100,000 bond.
