[Pants II]

Mr. Roof’s current address is listed in public records as being in this rural speck of a town southeast of Columbia with an overwhelmingly black population. On Mr. Roof’s Facebook profile, which was taken down Thursday, many of his 88 friends were black. More than half a dozen cars from the Richland County sheriff’s office were parked along the dusty driveway outside the two-story wood-frame home in Eastover. A man in a straw hat came out of the house and told a reporter: “Make your way right back where you came from. Get off the property now.”

From school records, Mr. Roof appears to have moved back and forth as a child between Richland County, which includes Columbia and Eastover, and nearby Lexington County to the west. He attended ninth grade twice: at White Knoll High School in Lexington in the 2008-9 school year and, the next school year, at White Knoll until February 2010, when he transferred to Dreher High School in Columbia. Neither school district had records of his finishing high school.

A neighbor in Eastover, Debra Scott, 50, said that she had seen Mr. Roof walking to and from a nearby market but that she knew very little about him or anyone else who might live in his house. She described the house as “very quiet” and said Mr. Roof “seemed like a normal kid.”

But Ms. Scott, who is black, said she was “scared to death” after hearing news reports that Mr. Roof wanted to kill black people. “My concern is that he’s saying he’s out to kill black people,” she said, unaware that he had been arrested. “We’re the closest ones to him.”

She added that her grandmother had called her Thursday morning and told her: “Get out of that bed. That boy was from Garners Ferry,” the name of the street where she and Mr. Roof lived.

Mr. Meek said that as a child, Mr. Roof would sometimes sleep over at his house. He described Mr. Roof as so quiet and shy that “his mom pushed him out of the house and told him to make friends.” He added, “Every friend he made, I made for him.”

Mr. Roof dropped out of high school after the ninth grade, Mr. Meek said, and the two fell out of touch. But this year, Mr. Roof sent him a Facebook friend request and the two got together again, often to go drinking or to strip clubs. Mr. Roof liked vodka and water, Mr. Meek said, adding, “I never saw him with a girl.”

He said Mr. Roof worked in landscaping and seemed to live an itinerant life, sometimes sleeping in his car. In recent weeks his behavior turned more bizarre, as he talked about wanting to burn an American flag and get his neck tattooed with the word “dagger.”

The friends last saw Mr. Roof on Tuesday when Ms. Fry found him sleeping in his car parked on a sandy patch in front of Mr. Meek’s house. Asked if she considered that odd, Ms. Fry replied, “He does weird things all the time.”

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/06/19/us...supremacy.html