LEXINGTON, S.C. (AP) — In recent weeks, Dylann Storm Roof reconnected with a childhood buddy he hadn't seen in five years and started railing about the Trayvon Martin case, about black people "taking over the world" and about the need for someone to do something about it for the sake of "the white race," the friend said Thursday. 
 
 Charleston Emergency Management Director Mark Wilbert holds a flier distributed to media, Thursday, June 18, 2015, with surveillance footage of a suspect wanted in the connection of a shooting Wednesday... (Associated Press) 
 
 Images on a flier provided to media, Thursday, June 18, 2015, by the Charleston Police Department show surveillance footage of a suspect wanted in connection with a shooting Wednesday at Emanuel AME Church... (Associated Press) 
 
 Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof is escorted from the Sheby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people Wednesday... (Associated Press) 
 
 Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof, center, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people... (Associated Press) 
 
 Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof is escorted from the Sheby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. Roof is a suspect in the shooting of several people Wednesday... (Associated Press) 
 
 Charleston, S.C., shooting suspect Dylann Storm Roof sits inside a police car as he is escorted from the Sheby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., Thursday, June 18, 2015. (AP Photo/Chuck Burton) (Associated Press) 
 
 On Thursday, Roof, 21, was arrested in the shooting deaths of nine people during a prayer meeting at a historic black church in Charleston — an attack decried by stunned community leaders and politicians as a hate crime. 
 
 In the hours after the Wednesday night bloodbath, a portrait began to take shape of Roof as someone with racist views and at least two recent run-ins with the law. On his Facebook page, the young white man wore a jacket with the flags of the former white-racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia. 
 
 In an interview with The Associated Press, Joseph Meek Jr. said he and Roof had been best friends in middle school but lost touch when Roof moved away about five years ago. The two reconnected a few weeks ago after Roof reached out to Meek on Facebook, Meek said. 
 
 Roof never talked about race years ago when they were friends, but recently made remarks out of the blue about the killing of unarmed black 17-year-old Trayvon Martin in Florida and the riots in Baltimore over the death of Freddie Gray in police custody, Meek said. 
 
 "He said blacks were taking over the world. Someone needed to do something about it for the white race," Meek said. "He said he wanted segregation between whites and blacks. I said, 'That's not the way it should be.' But he kept talking about it." 
 
 He said that when he woke up Wednesday morning, Roof was at his house, sleeping in his car outside. Later that day, Meek went to a lake with a couple of other people, but Roof hated the outdoors and decided he would rather go see a movie. 
 
 Meek said he didn't see his friend again until a surveillance-camera image of a young man with a soup-bowl haircut was broadcast on television Thursday morning in the wake of the shooting. Meek said he didn't think twice about calling authorities. 
 
 "I didn't THINK it was him. I KNEW it was him," he said. 
 
 The Southern Poverty Law Center, a civil rights group that tracks hate organizations and extremists, said it was not aware of Roof before the rampage. And some other friends interviewed said they did not know him to be racist. 
 
 "I never thought he'd do something like this," said high school friend Antonio Metze, 19. "He had black friends." 
 
 Roof used to skateboard while growing up in the Lexington area and had long hair back then. He attended high school in Lexington and in nearby Columbia from 2008 to 2010, school officials said. It was not immediately clear whether he graduated. 
 
 "He was pretty smart," Metze said. 
 
 Meek's mother, Kimberly Konzny, said she and her son instantly recognized Roof in the surveillance camera image because Roof had the same stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox video games in their home recently. It was stained because he had worked at a landscaping and pest control business, she said. 
 
 "I don't know what was going through his head," she said. "He was a really sweet kid. He was quiet. He only had a few friends." 
 
 State court records for Roof as an adult show a felony drug case from March that was pending against him and a misdemeanor trespassing charge from April. Authorities had no immediate details. As for any earlier offenses, juvenile records are generally sealed in South Carolina. 
 
 Court records list no attorney for him. 
 
 Meek said Roof's mother and her boyfriend live in Lexington, and his father lives in Columbia. 
 
 Roof displayed a Confederate flag on his license plate, according to Konzny, but that is not unusual in the South. 
 
 His Facebook profile picture showed him wearing a jacket with a green-and-white flag patch, the emblem of white-ruled Rhodesia, the African country that became Zimbabwe in 1980. Another patch showed the South African flag from the era of white minority rule that ended in the 1990s. 
 
 In Montgomery, Alabama, the president of the Southern Poverty Law Center, Richard Cohen, said it is unclear whether Roof had any connection to any of the 16 white supremacist organizations the SPLC has identified as operating in South Carolina. 
 
 But Cohen said that based on Roof's Facebook page, he appeared to be a "disaffected white supremacist." 
 
 In a statement, Cohen said the church attack is a reminder that while the post-Sept. 11 U.S. is focused on jihadi terrorism, the threat of homegrown extremism is "very real." Since 2000, the SPLC has seen an increase in the number of hate groups in the U.S., Cohen said. 
 
 "The increase has been driven by a backlash to the country's increasing racial diversity, an increase symbolized for many by the presence of an African American in the White House," he said. 
 
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 Associated Press writer Jay Reeves in Alabama contributed to this story. ||||| CHARLESTON, S.C. (AP) — A former friend who had reconnected with the man accused of a shooting massacre inside a historic black church in Charleston, South Carolina, said Dylann Storm Roof had become an avowed racist. 
 
 Gary and Aurelia Washington, center left and right, the son and granddaughter of Ethel Lance who died in Wednesday's shooting, leave a sidewalk memorial in front of Emanuel AME Church comforted by fellow... (Associated Press) 
 
 Olina Ortega, left, and Austin Gibbs light candles at a sidewalk memorial in front of Emanuel AME Church where people were killed by a white gunman Wednesday during a prayer meeting inside the historic... (Associated Press) 
 
 Olina Ortega, left, and Austin Gibbs light candles at a sidewalk memorial in front of Emanuel AME Church where people were killed by a white gunman Wednesday during a prayer meeting inside the historic... (Associated Press) 
 
 Joey Meek reconnected with Roof a few weeks ago and said that while they got drunk together on vodka, Roof began complaining that "blacks were taking over the world" and that "someone needed to do something about it for the white race." 
 
 Roof, 21, is accused of fatally shooting nine people during a Bible study at The Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on Wednesday night, ripping out a piece of South Carolina's civic heart and adding to the ever-growing list of America's racial casualties. 
 
 Police captured Roof in Shelby, North Carolina, after a motorist spotted him at a traffic light on her way to work. His apprehension ended an intense, hours-long manhunt. 
 
 Roof waived extradition and was back in Charleston on Thursday night with a bond hearing pending, authorities said. 
 
 Charleston officials announced a prayer vigil for Friday evening. The city's mayor described the shooting at the church as an act of "pure, pure concentrated evil." 
 
 The victims included a state senator who doubled as the church's minister, three other pastors, a regional library manager, a high school coach and speech therapist, a government administrator, a college enrollment counselor and a recent college graduate — six women and three men who felt called to open their church to all. 
 
 President Barack Obama called the tragedy yet another example of damage wreaked in America by guns. 
 
 NAACP President and CEO Cornell William Brooks said "there is no greater coward than a criminal who enters a house of God and slaughters innocent people." Others bemoaned the loss to a church that has served as a bastion of black power for 200 years, despite efforts by white supremacists to wipe it out. 
 
 "Of all cities, in Charleston, to have a horrible hateful person go into the church and kill people there to pray and worship with each other is something that is beyond any comprehension and is not explained," said Mayor Joseph P. Riley Jr. "We are going to put our arms around that church and that church family." 
 
 Surveillance video showed the gunman entering the church Wednesday night, and Charleston County Coroner Rae Wilson said he initially didn't appear threatening. 
 
 "The suspect entered the group and was accepted by them, as they believed that he wanted to join them in this Bible study," she said. Then, "he became very aggressive and violent." 
 
 Meek called the FBI after recognizing Roof in the surveillance footage, down to the stained sweatshirt he wore while playing Xbox videogames in Meek's home the morning of the attack. 
 
 "I didn't THINK it was him. I KNEW it was him," Meek told The Associated Press after being interviewed by investigators. 
 
 Meek said during their reunion a few weeks ago, Roof told him that he had used birthday money from his parents to buy a .45-caliber Glock pistol and that he had "a plan." He didn't say what the plan was, but Meek said it scared him enough that he took the gun out of Roof's car and hid it in his house until the next day. 
 
 It's not clear whether Roof had any connection to the 16 white supremacist organizations operating in South Carolina, but he appears to be a "disaffected white supremacist," based on his Facebook page, said Richard Cohen, president of Southern Poverty Law Center in Montgomery, Alabama. 
 
 On his Facebook page, Roof displayed the flags of defeated white-ruled regimes, posing with a Confederate flags plate on his car and wearing a jacket with stitched-on flag patches from apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, which is now black-led Zimbabwe. 
 
 His previous record includes misdemeanor drug and trespassing charges. 
 
 Spilling blood inside a black church — especially "Mother Emanuel," founded in 1816 — evoked painful memories nationwide, a reminder that black churches so often have been the targets of racist violence. 
 
 A church founder, Denmark Vesey, was hanged after trying to organize a slave revolt in 1822, and white landowners burned the church in revenge, leaving parishioners to worship underground until after the Civil War. The congregation rebuilt and grew stronger, eventually winning campaigns for voting rights and political representation. 
 
 Its lead pastor, state Sen. Clementa Pinckney — among the dead — recalled his church's history in a 2013 sermon, saying "we don't see ourselves as just a place where we come to worship, but as a beacon and as a bearer of the culture." 
 
 "What the church is all about," Pinckney said, is the "freedom to be fully what God intends us to be and have equality in the sight of God. And sometimes you got to make noise to do that. Sometimes you may have to die like Denmark Vesey to do that." 
 
 Pinckney, 41, was a married father of two and a Democrat who spent 19 years in the South Carolina legislature after he was first elected at 23, becoming the youngest member of the House. 
 
 The other victims were Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Sanders, 26; Myra Thompson, 59; Ethel Lance, 70; Susie Jackson, 87; and the reverends DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49; Sharonda Singleton, 45; and Daniel Simmons Sr., 74. 
 
 U.S. Attorney General Loretta Lynch said the attack would be investigated as a hate crime. 
 
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 Contributors include Alex Sanz, Meg Kinnard and David Goldman in Charleston, South Carolina; Mitch Weiss in Columbia, South Carolina; Jay Reeves in Birmingham, Alabama; Eric Tucker in Washington; and Jacob Jordan in Atlanta.
– The man accused of murdering nine people in a church in South Carolina got busted because of a woman who was leaving church in North Carolina. As ABC News explains, Debbie Dills was leaving church this morning when she noticed that the driver in the car next to her matched the description of the shooting suspect in Charleston. His bowl haircut was one giveaway. She called 911, and cops soon pulled over Dylann Roof in Shelby, NC. He had made it about 250 miles from the scene of the crime. Roof, 21, has waived extradition and was being returned to South Carolina. A friend tells AP that Roof, who wore a jacket that bore the flags of the former racist regimes of South Africa and Rhodesia, had been spouting racist talk lately. "He said blacks were taking over the world," recalls Joseph Meek. "Someone needed to do something about it for the white race." Meek says he was with Roof yesterday morning, but Roof opted not to go to a local lake with friends and said he would go to a movie instead. The next time Meek saw him was on surveillance photos released by police. "I didn't think it was him. I knew it was him," says Meek, who called police.