Charleston Church Shooting: Inside the Minds of (Surprisingly Young) Hate Crime Perpetrators

Dylann Storm Roof, center, the suspect in the Charleston, S.C., shootings, is escorted from the Shelby Police Department in Shelby, N.C., on Thursday. (Photo: AP Photo/Chuck Burton)

The details of the Wednesday-night shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, S.C., are still emerging, but what we do know is chilling.

The 21-year-old suspect, Dylann Storm Roof, reportedly entered the church during a prayer meeting just after 8 p.m. He asked for Rev. Clementa Pinckney and sat quietly next to the pastor for nearly an hour before opening fire.

He reloaded five times. He said he was there “to kill black people.” He said, “I have to do it. You rape our women and you’re taking over our country. And you have to go.” He killed nine people — six women and three men. Only three inside the church survived, two unharmed.

Police gather outside the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church after nine people were shot during a prayer meeting on June 17. (Photo: David Goldman/AP Photo)

The more details authorities uncover about the young Roof, who was reportedly “cooperative” when authorities picked him up 200 miles away from Charleston on Thursday morning, the more he appears to fit the profile of many other hate-crime perpetrators: a young man under the age of 25 with deeply held beliefs and disturbing motivations.

Hate alone is not a crime. However, a crime such as murder, arson, or vandalism on the basis of prejudice is considered hate crime. Congress has defined it as a “criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation.”

Dylann Storm Roof, the suspect in the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church. (Photo: Lexington County Detention Center/Associated Press)

Data suggests that 50 percent of those who commit hate crimes are under 25. They are also frequently male. Roof — if it is confirmed that he did commit the crime in Charleston — is both. Russell Henderson and Aaron McKinney were 21 and 22, respectively, when they stood trial for murdering Matthew Shepard, a gay man from Wyoming, in 1998. In 2012, Deryl Dedmon, 19, John A. Rice, 18, and Dylan Butler, 20, all pled guilty to killing a 47-year-old African-American man, James Anderson, in Mississippi.

Why young men?

There are several reasons, according to Robert J. Sternberg, PhD, a professor of human development at Cornell University and editor of The Psychology of Hate. Young men are more available to commit hate crimes, as they’re less likely to have been incarcerated already. And they’re often looking to make a name for themselves.

A photo of Dylann Storm Roof from his Facebook page, wearing a leather jacket stitched with two flags that are symbols of white supremacy — one from apartheid-era South Africa and the other from Rhodesia during its time of white rule. (Photo: Dylann Storm Roof/Facebook)

In the Charleston shooting, one victim was told by the shooter that she would be left unharmed in order to spread the word. “Her life was spared, and [she was] told, ‘I’m not going to kill you, I’m going to spare you, so you can tell them what happened,’” Dot Scott, president of the NAACP in Charleston, told CNN. She said she learned this information from the victim’s family.

“[Young men] are more testosterone driven” and can sometimes displace their anger, Sternberg tells Yahoo Health. “They are young enough to have a false sense of themselves. In particular, they believe they are omnipotent — can do whatever they want — and invulnerable — can get away with it without consequences — because they are too smart to get caught.”

Related: Why Don’t We Study Gun Violence the Way We Study Car Accidents?

Plus, the brain is not fully developed until roughly age 25, which also factors in the element of youth, says Herbert Nieburg, PhD, an associate professor in the Department of Law and Justice Policy Studies at Mitchell College in New London, Conn.

“The adolescent brain is more susceptible to impulsivity, spontaneity, and acting before you think,” Nieburg tells Yahoo Health. “The perpetrators also often tend to be really alienated and peripheralized — they see themselves as not accepted and not wanted.”

While there’s no sign that Roof was bullied or an extreme outcast in high school, one of his classmates did say he was “kind of wild,” spouting racial slurs and engaging in attention-seeking behaviors such as pill-popping. Yet, another one of his high school peers said he went largely unnoticed. “A lot of people don’t remember seeing him,” Adam Martin told the Daily Beast. “I had classes with him, [which] is why I remember him.”

Hate crimes are usually very layered 

Nieburg says that hate crimes are obviously not drug motivated, as so many crimes are, and they’re not simply mass killings, or someone murdering for purely psychological reasons, as was the case in Newtown, Conn., and the movie theater shooting in Aurora, Colo., both in 2012. A hate crime tends to culminate from an existential dilemma, especially for young perpetrators.

“It’s deeper — it’s sociological, it’s anthropological,” he explains. “They don’t like the world and see it as a screwed-up place.”

Related: The History of Mass Killings in the U.S. Over the Last 25 Years

Perpetrators are confusedly disturbed, creating “a story about the vile nature of the target,” Sternberg says. “The story might be that they are subhuman, insect-like, reptilian, defilers of purity, destroyers of civilization, or whatever.”

To anyone looking in, hate crimes are heinous acts of nonsensical violence. Sternberg adds that the story line the perpetrator has concocted is absolutely “silly on its face,” just “not to the believer.” Therefore, most crimes of this nature are the perfect storm, stemming from “triangular” motives. There’s a negation of intimacy, there’s passion, and there’s commitment.

“Viewing the targets as less than human, as vile, as even beneath contempt, the perpetrator comes to believe that the targets are getting what they deserve,” Sternberg says. “The perpetrator also passionately believes in the inherent awfulness of the targets. He or she — usually he — feels highly motivated to act on his feelings of rage and anger.”

The final element is a deeply rooted belief in the rightness of their cause. “The perpetrator is committed to his belief,” Sternberg says. “It’s not something he just thought of on the spur of the moment, but rather something he has come to believe and hold, over time, with conviction.”

According to the Daily Beast, there’s not a lot of information on Roof’s Facebook page. However, a few telling details have emerged in images. In one photo, he is wearing a coat adorned with two flags representing times of apartheid in South Africa and Rhodesia. In another photo, the suspect is shown sitting atop his car with an ornamental license plate depicting a Confederate flag.

Ultimately, hate crimes are complex tragedies, the result of long-held misguided convictions and internal struggles colliding with a moment of impulsivity. “Every criminal has a story, a play, or a novel their life is adhering to,” Nieburg says. “In young people I see, it’s one of alienation.”

There’s never an excuse for a hate crime; there are only unfortunate reasons we can trace after the fact. Sadly, until the darkest parts of society change, it’s the victims who will continue to be caught in the crossfire.

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