It is devoid of a loving tone, except to say to his father that he was a good dad. (Contacted later, Benn Roof declined to participate in this story further, describing it as “fake news.”) In Dylann's farewell note to his father, found torn out of a journal in the backseat of his car, there is no nostalgia. There was just this, just intrusions from strangers who wanted an answer and felt the nature of his son's crime warranted one-and just Benn Roof letting his two giant Rottweilers out the front door to track me and to make sure I'd gone back into the dark street and the black night I'd come from.īenn Roof never showed up at his son's trial. After Dylann did what he did, there was no going back to Key West, or to some easy before. Wrapped in that moonless night, I knocked on the door of the yellow house, and in the confusion of having an unknown black woman at his door a few hours before midnight, wanting to talk about his son, Bennett Roof let me come in and handed me an ice-cold beer that tasted like relief in my paper-dry mouth, parched from nerves.Įven when I pushed him, he said it again, and then he shook his head and kept saying it until he asked me to leave, with the sad look of a man who wanted any other life than this one.
A detail I could take with me to help make sense of impossibly awful things. I stood there across the street, lying in wait. The decals, the rusted wind chimes, and the slightly mildewed lawn furniture give the house the feel of one man's Margaritaville. Someone has tied an American flag to the tree out front. And on the door there are two faded Ron Jon Surf Shop stickers and a smaller, “I Voted” sticker. On the mailbox, there is a route sign: end 1 key west. It is in a nice enough neighborhood, but still looks like a place where people go when their dreams elsewhere have washed up and gone dry. Low-slung, yellow, a Craftsman-style bungalow. There is nothing else at the end of the street except the Roofs' little house. Behind the lot, there is a small apartment building that is lit up with too many halogen lights, probably to keep people from loitering and doing the dumb shit people do when they think nobody can see them. Not like Columbia.ĭylann Roof's father lives on a dead-end street at the edge of Columbia, across from a lot that is as vast and empty as the end of the world.
#SMART SHOOTER GLASSES CIVIL WAR FULL#
It was a city full of relics and buildings that reminded him of a time when white men were mighty, and the masters of their dominions, a time when they had prevailed. It was once home to the most enslaved people in the country. To try to understand the place where he wasted 21 years of a life until he committed an act so heinous that he became the first person sentenced to die for a federal hate crime in the entire history of the United States of America.ĭylann had always preferred Charleston. Which is why I left Charleston, the site of his crime, and headed inland to Richland County, to Columbia, South Carolina-to find the people who knew him, to see where Roof was born and raised. He remained in control, just the way he wanted to be.Īnd so, after weeks in the courtroom, and shortly before Dylann Roof was asked to stand and listen to his sentence, I decided that if he would not tell us his story, then I would.
Roof was safeguarded by his knowledge that white American terrorism is never waterboarded for answers, it is never twisted out for meaning, we never identify its “handlers,” and we could not force him to do a thing. He did not have to dignify our questions with a response or explain anything at all to the people whose relatives he had maimed and murdered.
Over and over again, without even bothering to open his mouth, Roof reminded us that he did not have to answer to anyone. But from gavel to gavel, as I listened to the testimony of the survivors and family members, often the only thing I could focus on, and what would keep me up most nights while I was there, was the magnitude of Dylann Roof's silence, his refusal to even look up, to ever explain why he did what he had done. I had come to Charleston intending to write about them, the nine people who were gone. Some said they were working the Devil from his body. But even during all of this chaos, this pain that made the courtroom feel swollen with grief, Dylann Roof did not appear to look back at his very own mother.Īfter Roof was found guilty, they went up to the podium, one by one, when it was time for the victim-impact testimony, and standing near the jury box, they screamed, wept, prayed, cursed. When Dylann Roof's mother fainted in the courtroom, a reporter from ABC and I called for a medic, and not knowing what else to do, I used my tissues to put a cold compress on her forehead and started dabbing it-before I felt out of place, or realized that I was too much in place, inside of a history of caretaking and comforting for fainting white women when the real victims were seated across the aisle, still crying.