A black friend of the white man accused of murdering nine people at a Charleston church says the suspect told him a week prior to the killings that he planned to shoot up a local college campus.
Christon Scriven, a drinking buddy of Dylann Roof, told The Associated Press Friday that he thought Roof’s statements were just drunken bluster. However, Scriven said that he was concerned enough that he and another friend, Joey Meek, went out to take his .45-caliber gun, hiding it in an air-conditioning vent of a mobile home until they all sobered up.
"He just said he was going to hurt a bunch of people" at the College of Charleston," said Scriven, 22.
"I said, 'What did you say? Why do you want to hurt those people in Charleston?'"
"He just said, 'In seven days. ... I have seven days.'"
Just a week later, Roof, 21, is believed to have gone into Charleston’s historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, sat in for a Bible study class for at least an hour and then fired upon participants.
Other friends have described Roof as a troubled and confused young man who alternated between partying with black friends and ranting against blacks to his white friends.
Four months before the deadly rampage, court records show Roof was arrested at a Columbia shopping mall on a misdemeanor drug charge after going around dressed in all black, asking suspicious questions about when stores closed and employees left for the night. He was then arrested again, for trespassing at the mall despite being banned from the premises.
Before it was deleted, Roof’s Facebook profile showed a picture of himself 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.
