Survivor: Dylann ‘evil as can be’

One of just three survivors of last year’s massacre at a historic black church tearfully recounted the merciless bloodbath in testimony Wednesday against Dylann Roof, calling the man who shot her son dead “evil as can be.”

Felicia Sanders, the first witness at Roof ’s federal death-penalty trial, said the avowed white supremacist opened fire while she and other worshippers — who had welcomed him in with open arms — had their eyes closed in prayer near the end of a Bible-study session.

“As I heard the defendant shooting . . . I grabbed my grandbaby, and she was saying, ‘Granny, Granny, I’m so scared, I’m just so scared,’ ” Sanders testified.

“I said, ‘Play dead.’ I muzzled her face to my body so tight, I thought I suffocated her,” she said of her then-11-year-old granddaughter.

Sanders said that as they lay on the floor, “I could feel the warm blood flowing on each side” from the dead and dying around them.

She also described the horror that followed when her wounded son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, asked the baby-faced killer, “Why are you doing this?”

“The defendant over there — with his head hanging down, refusing to look at me — said, ‘I have to do this. Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world,’ ” Sanders recalled.

“That’s when he put about five bullets in my son,” she testified, before heartbreakingly noting, “I watched my son come into this world and I watched my son leave this world.”

Roof, clad in a gray prison jumpsuit, never once had the nerve to look her in the eye as she recounted his rampage.

Sanders — who survived along with her granddaughter and a woman whom Roof told he was leaving alive as a witness — said she was “just waiting on my turn . . . from a man we thought was looking for the Lord” when he showed up at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, SC.

“He just sat there the whole time, evil, evil, evil as can be,” she said.

Relatives of the nine victims sobbed and prayed in the courtroom, and several jurors fought back tears.

Sanders, 59, faced a brief crossexamination, and was asked by Roof ’s lawyer if she heard the killer say he was only planned to kill himself.

“I was counting on that. He’s evil. There’s no place on Earth for him, except in the pit of Hell,” she answered, prompting several spectators to murmur “Mm-hmm.”

During opening statements, defense lawyer David Bruck conceded that the case against Roof was “open and shut,” and said the only remaining question was his punishment.

“Remember, life means life in prison,” Bruck told jurors.

Roof, now 22, offered to plead guilty before trial in exchange for a life sentence but prosecutors turned down the deal.

Assistant US Attorney Jay Richardson told jurors that Roof fully confessed to the June 17, 2015, slaughter in which the first victim was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a Democratic state senator who had given his killer a Bible, a study guide and a seat beside him.

Roof carried out the fiendish attack with a Glock .45 pistol after typing up a manifesto the prosecutor described as a “call to arms” directed at white people, Richardson said.

At one point, Roof ’s mother, who was watching the proceedings, collapsed in court and had to be taken out.

The opening testimony came after lawyers picked 18 potential jurors, with court officials describing 12 of them as white, five as black and one as “other.” The 12 who will decide the case won’t learn who they are until right before deliberations.

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