Suspected shooter of the 2015 Charleston church shooting who claimed to have taken the lives of nine African Americans, including a senior pastor state senator Clementa C. Pinckney. He was charged with nine counts of murder and faced the death penalty.
He was diagnosed with obsessive-compulsive disorder growing up. He worked for his father as a landscaper for a time.
He confessed that he committed the heinous crime in order to ignite a race war. He owned a website called The Last Rhodesian which featured pictures of him with symbols of white supremacy and neo-Nazism.
He was born in parents Franklin Bennett and Amelia Cowles, a carpenter and bartender, respectively. His parents divorced and his father remarried a woman named Paige Mann.
He claimed to have developed his white supremacist views following the shooting of Trayvon Martin.
