Anyone who runs into a building and mows down innocent people is a monster, with or without us knowing anything about them. As details come to light about Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old arrested and charged with the shooting inside a Charleston, South Carolina church, it appears there may have been a few red flags that someone might have picked up on.

Now we know that our country has a bit of a bad rep overseas at present but there’s one picture that probably won’t do that cause any good. That is this picture below, taken off Dylann’s now defunct Facebook page, showing him in a jacket adorned with the old South African and Zimbabwean (then Rhodesian) flags. It isn’t from the day of the shooting but you can have no doubt that USA’s 24-hour news channels will pick relentlessly at every detail they can.

I’m no expert but this guy looks like a real creep to me. Here’s the Daily Beast with the rest of his rap sheet:

Roof was previously arrested on April 26 on a trespassing charge and was awaiting moderation. On February 28, Roof was arrested for drug possession at a mall in Columbia…a police incident report said Roof possessed Suboxone, a pain drug sometimes used to treat opiate addiction, without a prescription.

Another Facebook photo of Roof sitting on the roof of his car showed an ornamental license plate with a Confederate flag on it….

“He used drugs heavily a lot,” [schoolmate John] Mullins said. “It was obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that.”

“I never heard him say anything, but just he had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs,” he said. “He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don’t really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that.”

Another former schoolmate said that in the wake of the shootings of Trayvon Martin and Freddie Gray Roof had reached out to him and commented that black people were ‘taking over the world’:

“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.”

Another piece of damning evidence from his roommate Dalton Tyler:

“He was big into segregation and other stuff,” Tyler said. “He said he wanted to start a civil war. He said he was going to do something like that and then kill himself.”

All of this begs the question of why no one saw fit to alert authorities and, even worse, why his father would give him a .45-calibre pistol for his birthday.

Here’s Obama, who personally knew one of the nine victims, addressing the nation from the White House, courtesy of the Telegraph:

“I’ve had to make statements like this too many times. Communities like this have had to endure tragedies like this too many times,” he said.

“We don’t have all the facts but we do know that once again, innocent people were killed in part because someone who wanted to inflict harm had no trouble getting their hands on a gun.”

I will leave you with this, allegedly Roof’s words to a survivor as he ran amok:

“I have to do it. You’re raping our women and taking over the country. You have to go.”

[sources:dailymail&telegraph&dailybeast]