Breaking News: Charleston - Racist online manifesto mentions - Dylann Roof - iReporter News Network

A website featuring a racist manifesto mentions Charleston as the "historic" target of an attack and displays images of Dylann Roof, the 21-year-old who shot nine people to death at Charleston's Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.

The writer said he was "not raised in a racist environment." But the 2012 shooting of Trayvon Martin -- the black Florida teen whose shooting death at the hands of George Zimmerman, who was acquitted of murder, provoked huge protests -- prompted him to research online what he called "black on white crime."

"The event that truly awakened me was the Trayvon Martin case," the text says. "I kept hearing and seeing his name, and eventually I decided to look him up."

An Internet ownership search shows the website was registered to Roof, who is also listed as the administrator. It listed not only Roof's name, but his South Carolina address, his email, and his phone.

The website appears to have launched in February but surfaced on Twitter and other social media Saturday.

Near the end of the 2,000-word screed, under a section titled "An Explanation," the writer hints at why Charleston was targeted.

"I have no choice. I am not in the position to, alone, go into the ghetto and fight. I chose Charleston because it is most historic city in my state, and at one time had the highest ratio of blacks to Whites in the country. We have no skinheads, no real KKK, no one doing anything but talking on the internet. Well someone has to have the bravery to take it to the real world, and I guess that has to be me."

Investigators are poring over his communications and Internet sites Roof visited, a law enforcement official said. Roof spent a lot of time online reading racist material but nothing has emerged indicating the attack was directed by a white supremacist group, the official said.

In the text, the writer described the Martin shooting as a turning point.

"It was obvious that Zimmerman was in the right," the text says, adding that the writer was transformed by the "pages upon pages of ... brutal black on White murders" chronicled online.

"I have never been the same since that day," the writer said.

"I was in disbelief. At this moment I realized that something was very wrong. How could the news be blowing up the Trayvon Martin case while hundreds of these black on White murders got ignored?"

In a statement, Benjamin Crump, lead attorney for Martin's family, said "it is not uncommon for those who commit unspeakable acts of violence to blame their heinous behavior on the actions of others."