Dylann Storm Roof is an American white supremacist, Neo-Nazi, and mass murderer who is currently serving time on death row at USP Terre Haute for perpetrating the Charleston church shooting on June 17, 2015, in the U.S. state of South Carolina. During a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured a tenth 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. Roof's actions in Charleston have been widely described as domestic terrorism.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 toward Black people, among other groups. He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 killing of Trayvon Martin and Black-on-white crime.
On December 15, 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all 33 federal charges against him stemming from the shooting; on January 11, 2017, he was sentenced to death for those crimes. On March 31, 2017, Roof agreed to plead guilty in South Carolina state court to all state charges pending against him—nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder, and possession of a firearm during the commission of a felony—to avoid a second death sentence. In return, he accepted a sentence of life in prison without parole. On April 10, 2017, Roof was sentenced to nine consecutive sentences of life without parole after formally pleading guilty to state murder charges.
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