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A federal jury convicted Dylann Storm Roof on all 33 counts and sentenced him to death for opening fire during a Bible study at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, South Carolina, killing nine Black church members on June 17, 2015.

Roof joined the Bible study in the fellowship hall and sat beside the pastor for nearly an hour before opening fire. Those killed were Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, the church's pastor and a South Carolina state senator; Cynthia Graham Hurd; Susie Jackson; Ethel Lee Lance; Depayne Middleton-Doctor; Tywanza Sanders; Daniel L. Simmons; Sharonda Coleman-Singleton; and Myra Thompson. Six were women and three were men. Eight died at the scene, and Simmons died at a hospital. Fifty-four projectiles were recovered from the nine bodies.

Five people in the building survived, among them Felicia Sanders, the mother of Tywanza Sanders, her five-year-old granddaughter, who is not named here, and Bible study member Polly Sheppard. Roof left before police arrived. He had no connection to the church or anyone in it.

Emanuel AME Church, founded in 1816, is one of the oldest Black congregations in the South. Roof was a 21-year-old white man from Lexington, South Carolina, who had left high school in February 2010 and had been arrested twice in Lexington County earlier in 2015. In an image circulated after the shooting, he wore a jacket bearing the flags of apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia.

Charleston police released church security-camera images of the gunman and his car overnight. A childhood friend, Joey Meek, recognized him and contacted the FBI. Roof's father and uncle also identified him from the photographs. On the morning of June 18, 2015, a woman driving to work in Shelby, North Carolina, saw a car matching the description, recognized the driver from the news and had police alerted. Roof was stopped in traffic and arrested. The Charleston police chief said he cooperated.

FBI agents interviewed Roof at the Shelby police department that day, roughly 17 hours after the shooting. They advised him of his rights on camera and confirmed that he was speaking without a lawyer present. Over about two hours, he confessed, saying he went to the church in Charleston and did it. He said he considered himself a white supremacist and gave a racial motive, claiming Black men were raping white women. A journal recovered from his car contained white-supremacist writing and symbols. FBI investigator Michael Stansbury testified about the recording when it was played to the jury in December 2016.

Roof was charged federally with 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, and represented himself for parts of the case. The jury convicted him on all counts on December 15, 2016. During the penalty phase, he told jurors, "I still feel like I had to do it." The jury returned a death sentence on January 10, 2017, the first in a federal hate crimes case. On April 10, 2017, he pleaded guilty in state court to nine counts of murder, three counts of attempted murder and a weapons charge under an agreement calling for life imprisonment.

The Fourth Circuit affirmed the convictions and death sentence on August 25, 2021, and the Supreme Court denied review on October 11, 2022. Roof was one of three inmates excluded when President Biden commuted 37 federal death sentences on December 23, 2024. In March 2025, Roof sought the recusal of trial judge Richard M. Gergel, then moved to vacate his conviction and sentence under 28 U.S.C. 2255. The Fourth Circuit denied the mandamus petition on recusal on August 13, 2025, and denied rehearing on November 13, 2025. Roof filed a further Supreme Court petition on April 10, 2026. The government opposed it on July 15, 2026, and it was distributed on July 30, 2026, for the conference of September 28, 2026. Roof is on federal death row at Terre Haute, Indiana. No execution date has been set.

The video is a police interview-room recording running about 121 minutes. It shows the interview itself, without narration or a presenter.