CHARLESTON, S.C. — Prosecutors are using the Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof’s own words to portray him as a cruel angry racist at his death penalty trial.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Prosecutors are using the Charleston church shooter Dylann Roof’s own words to portray him as a cruel angry racist at his death penalty trial.
Roof’s two-hour confession to killing nine people at a church Bible study, recorded the day after the shooting, was introduced as evidence Friday, along with a handwritten journal found in his car.
“How could our faces, skin color and body structure be so different, but our brains exactly the same?” Roof wrote in one of the less offensive passages.
In the video, Roof laughed repeatedly and made exaggerated gun motions as he described the massacre.
He wanted to leave at least one person alive to tell what happened, he explained, complaining that his victims “complicated things” by hiding under tables.
He thought about shooting drug dealers, but they might shoot back, he said. Instead, Roof told the FBI, he picked the historic Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015 because there likely wouldn’t be white people there, and the people he chose to slaughter were more likely to be meek.
“I knew that would be a place to get a small amount of black people in one area,” Roof said.
Roof’s lawyers have conceded that he carried out the attack, and are focused on persuading jurors to spare his life in the penalty phase of the trial. They said in opening statements they will call few or no witnesses.
Along with the overt racism, Roof’s confession and notes show the then-21-year-old as naive and immature. He wrote a note apologizing to his mother and saying “as childish as it sounds, I wish I was in your arms.”
But Roof meticulously prepared for the shootings.
He carried eight magazines that could each hold 13 rounds, but loaded only 11 each so that he could shoot 88 times. That’s a revered number among white supremacists, standing for “Heil Hitler” because H is the eighth letter of the alphabet.
Roof said he left bullets in a magazine so that he could kill himself after the slayings, but changed his mind when he didn’t immediately see any police.