The roommate of the white, 21-year old man who allegedly massacred nine people at a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina said Thursday that he thought the suspect had been planning the attack for about six months.
Dalton Tyler told ABC News that he’d known Dylann Storm Roof for about seven months to a year. Tyler told the news outlet that he last saw Roof about a week ago and knew he’d been planning something like the Charleston church attack “for six months.”
“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler told ABC News. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”
Tyler described Roof as “on and off” with his parents, according to ABC News. Members of Roof’s immediate family have not given extensive comment on his alleged crime.
A woman who on Thursday answered a cellphone belonging to Roof’s mother, Amelia, told Reuters “We will be doing no interviews ever.”
A reporter for the Post And Courier newspaper tweeted that a man who answered the door at Roof’s Eastover, South Carolina home declined to speak with reporters and told them get off his property.
A man inside #DylannRoof‘s home declined to speak, adding we should get off his property before he called deputies. pic.twitter.com/oolwWHdelc
— Cynthia Roldan (@CynthiaRoldan) June 18, 2015
