An agency that tracks extremists and white supremacist organizations says the suspect in the fatal shooting of nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, wasn’t known to officials there. Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama, says suspect 21-year-old Dylann Storm Roof – who is white – wasn’t known to the organization. Cohen says it’s not clear whether Roof is connected to any of the 16 white supremacist organizations the law center has identified as operating in South Carolina. But Cohen says Roof appears to be a disaffected white supremacist; based on his Facebook page, which Cohen viewed. Cohen notes that Roof was pictured wearing a jacket with emblems of the old apartheid regime in South Africa and the former African nation of Rhodesia, which was the name of Zimbabwe under white rule. Photos on Roof’s Facebook page show the young man sitting on a Hyundai Elentra, the car that he was arrested in, bosting a front license plate with three confederate flags and reads Confederate States of America. The front license plate appears to match the plate found on the surveillance images taken at Emanuel AME Church.
