After a roughly 12-hour search, the man who attacked Charleston, South Carolina's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church is now in police custody. Twenty-one-year-old Dylann Storm Roof was arrested on Thursday morning in Shelby, North Carolina, about 250 miles from where he fatally shot nine people as they attended a Wednesday night bible study. "I have to do it," Roof reportedly told members of the historic black congregation as he fired on them. "You rape our women and you're taking over our country and you have to go." Here's what we know about Roof so far:

• Charleston Police Chief Greg Mullen said that Roof "was in the church about an hour before the actual deaths" and that he paticipated in the congregants' meeting. According to several reports, Roof purposely avoided murdering one churchgoer, telling her, "I'm not going to kill you, I'm going to spare you, so you can tell them what happened."

• According to the Columbia State, "a tip from a citizen about a suspicious vehicle" led to Roof's arrest. "Mullen would not talk about whether the suspect admitted to the crime or whether police found any weapons in the vehicle," the State reports. "Mullen said Roof was cooperative with the officer who stopped him. Authorities believe that Roof acted alone." CNN reports that Roof was "armed with a gun" when he was apprehended.

• In his Facebook photo (below), Roof wears a jacket featuring the flags of Apartheid-era South Africa and Rhodesia, a British colony that was ruled by a white minority until 1980, when it gained independence and became Zimbabwe. In another photo posted to Facebook, Roof poses with a Confederate-flag license plate.

• The Associated Press reports Roof was arrested in March on felony drug-possession charges. A month later, he was arrested for trespassing.

• Roof's uncle, Carson Cowles, seems to have contacted the police after recognizing his nephew in a surveillance still. Cowles told Reuters that Roof's father recently gifted the 21-year-old a .45-caliber pistol. "Nobody in my family had seen anything like this coming. I said, if it is him, and when they catch him, he's got to pay for this," said Cowles. When reached on her cell phone, Roof's mother told a reporter, "We will be doing no interviews, ever."

• Roof grew up in Columbia, South Carolina and attended White Knoll High School. A former classmate told the Daily Beast that Roof "used drugs heavily a lot." "It [was] obviously harder than marijuana. He was like a pill popper, from what I understood. Like Xanax, and stuff like that." The classmate, John Mullins, also said that Roof "had that kind of Southern pride, I guess some would say. Strong conservative beliefs. He made a lot of racist jokes, but you don't really take them seriously like that. You don’t really think of it like that."