The FBI reportedly was reviewing Saturday a website purportedly containing a “manifesto” written by Dyann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old North Carolina man accused of murdering nine people Wednesday inside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.
Several news organizations, including the Associated Press, the New York Times and Charleston Post and Courier, reported that the website posting is filled with the language of racial hatred and epithets , and that while no name is attached to the writings, it also contains 60 pictures that include Roof holding a Confederate flag and a close-up of a .45-caliber pistol. He is accused of using a similar handgun in the church shooting.
The long racist rant posted to the site concludes: “I have no choice. 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.”
The New York Times reported that in one photo Roof is shown posing with wax figures of slaves. The paper said the photos appear to have been taken at a slave plantation, Sullivan Island, S.C., and at the Museum and Library of Confederate History.
Before it was deleted, Roof’s Facebook profile showed a picture of him wearing a jacked adorned with white-supremacist flags of troubled South Africa and the former country of white-ruled Rhodesia. Roof also had several black people among his social connections.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.
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