A friend of Dylann Roof, the man charged with fatally shooting nine people at a historic black church in South Carolina, said if he had any idea what the 21-year-old was planning he would have stopped him.
Joey Meek said he had never heard Roof say anything racist except for one night when Roof was drinking vodka heavily and "said that he wanted segregation between the whites and the blacks" and that he "wanted to do something crazy."
"He just didn’t say he wanted to go out and kill a whole bunch of innocent black people in a church," Meek said. "If he would’ve ... said that he had a plan to do that then this would have never even happened."
Roof admitted to opening fire at a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston Wednesday, sources said.
Meek was concerned enough about Roof's state of intoxication that he took Roof’s gun away from him, but returned it the next morning. He said he tried to find out more about what Roof had in mind, but his friend wouldn’t elaborate.
"I mean, I didn’t take him seriously at all about what he was saying because he wasn’t saying it serious," Meek said. "Something crazy could’ve been ... driving crazy down a road," Meek said.
Police believe the attack was a hate crime, and a white supremacist website appears to belong to Roof.
"While he was intoxicated was the only time I ever heard him say anything about the black race," said Meek. "That’s not the Dylann I knew."
