James Gosnell

Dylann Storm Roof (born April 3, 1994) is an American mass murderer and white supremacist convicted of perpetrating the Charleston church shooting. During a prayer service at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Roof killed nine people, all African Americans, including senior pastor and state senator Clementa C. Pinckney, and injured one other person. After several people identified Roof as the main suspect, he became the centre 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. 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 blacks, among other peoples. He also claimed in the manifesto to have developed his white supremacist views after reading about the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin and "black-on-white crime." In December 2016, Roof was convicted in federal court of all 33 federal hate crime charges against him stemming from the shooting; he was sentenced to death for those crimes the following month. 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 will accept a sentence of life in prison without parole. On April 10, 2017, Roof was sentenced to life without parole nine times after pleading guilty to state murder charges.