According to a friend of the man accused of carrying out the deadly shooting at a church in Charleston, Dylann Roof had earlier spoken of “shooting up a college campus” in the city.
Roof’s friend, Christon Scriven, said in a statement that he thought Roof’s words were just “drunken banter”. Yet, Scriven and another friend went to Roof’s car, took away his 45-calibre gun and hid it in a ventilation shaft at a mobile home until they all sobered up.
Scriven said that “he (Roof) said that he was going to hurt a bunch of people”.
Seven days later, Roof killed nine church goers in Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church,
Four months before the attack, court records show Roof was arrested at a Columbia shopping mall on a misdemeanour drug charge. He was allegedly dressed all in black, asking strange questions about when stores closed and when employees left for the night.
Roof is described as a “troubled and confused” young man who would one day party with black friends, and rant about black people to his white friends the next.