Dylann Roof’s Past Reveals Trouble at Home and School

By Published on July 16, 2015

The young man accused of the terrible crime was a bug-eyed boy with a bowl haircut who came from a broken home and attended at least seven schools in nine years. Many afternoons he would sit silently on the curb in front of his roomy yard and, when he tired of it, move to a different curb. He helped neighbors with their yard work, but they still found him strange.

Dylann Storm Roof, the 21-year-old white man charged with killing nine black parishioners in a storied Charleston, S.C., church last month, attended solidly middle-class, racially integrated schools, grew up with black friends and came from a respected family, his grandfather a well-known local lawyer. But court records suggest that his divorced parents struggled with finances when he was a teenager, with his mother being evicted from her home in 2009 and his father’s once-successful business renovating historic homes falling into debt and closing a few years later.

 

Read the article “Dylann Roof’s Past Reveals Trouble at Home and School” on nytimes.com.

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