U.S. Suspect in Church Shooting Had Apartheid-Era Patches

CHARLESTON, S.C. — Jun 18, 2015, 2:04 PM ET
By MEG KINNARD, MITCH WEISS and JACOB JORDAN Associated Press

Dylann Storm Roof drove around with a Confederate flag on his license plate — not exactly an unusual sight in the South. But on his Facebook page, he wore a jacket with the flags of the former white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia.

A picture began to emerge Thursday of the 21-year-old white man arrested in the shooting deaths of nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic black church in Charleston. The Wednesday night attack was decried by stunned community leaders and politicians as a hate crime.

In the hours after the bloodbath, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that tracks hate organizations and extremists, said it was not aware of Roof before the rampage. And some friends said they did not know him to be racist.

"I never thought he'd do something like this," said high school friend Antonio Metze, 19. "He had black friends."

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His Facebook profile picture showed him wearing a jacket with a green-and-white flag patch, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, the African country that became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the era of white minority rule that ended in the 1990s

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