Church killer lost count

Stunned to hear he gunned down 9

CHARLESTON, SC — He called himself “brave” for slaughtering nine defenseless churchgoers — and didn’t even bother to count his dead.

“I went to that church in Charleston, and, I, uh, did it,” an emotionless Dylann Roof told the FBI at the start of a confession tape played at his church massacre trial on Friday.

“If I was going to guess, five?” he answered when asked how many people he shot at the Emanuel AME Church on a Wednesday night in June 2015.

Roof, 22, had admittedly joined a basement prayer circle for an hour, then pulled a gun from his fanny pack and started firing.

“Maybe four? I’m really not sure exactly,” Roof guessed, when pressed again for a number.

“They were all under the tables,” he explained of his confusion.

Told his death toll was nine, Roof appeared surprised.

“There wasn’t even that many people in there!” he complained to his interrogators. “Are you lying to me?”

Anyone looking for a sign of humanity in Dylann Roof — an avowed white supremacist who’d hoped to start a race war by massacring black innocents — would have been hard pressed Friday, as his two-hour confession was played to a packed courtroom.

“Nobody else is brave enough to do anything about it,” he boasted of his twisted mission of racial revenge.

“I had to do it, because somebody had to do something.”

Friday was day three of Roof ’s federal trial on a 33-count hatecrime indictment. He faces the death penalty if convicted.

The confession tape played Friday was filmed the day after the shootings, in an interview room at the Shelby, NC, police department, where he’d been brought in by local cops following a traffic-stop arrest nearby.

Often his utterances were flat, robotic.

But excitement appeared to rise in his voice as he lifted his right hand and recreated firing his .45-caliber Glock for FBI investigators.

Later Friday, the real gun was entered into evidence.

Roof intentionally carried with him 88 bullets, he boasted in the confession.

He proudly explained that “H” is the eighth letter of the alphabet.

And so 88, or “HH,” represents “Heil Hitler,” he explained.

Roof even broke into the occasional chuckle — as when he joked about his penchant for wearing black.

“Black’s a nice color,” he said, giving a chortle before completing his thought. “For clothes.” The massacre left the church pastor and eight other worshippers dead — but, “Black people are killing white people every day,” he claimed on the tape.

“What I did is so minuscule to what they do to white people every day.”

Creepily, he added, “The KKK never did anything anyways.”

Roof conceded that he’d been welcomed into the prayer circle — worshippers even pulled out a chair for him to sit in —and he admitted, “A black person has never done anything to me personally.”

Roof was asked by his FBI interrogators whether he’d said anything to his victims.

“I didn’t say anything to them before,” Roof said. “It was very fast.”

He also said he targeted the church specifically because it is historic, and chose Charleston for its high ratio of black people to white people.

“I knew that would be a place to get a small amount of black people in one area,” he said of his choice.

At one point, agents ask if he considered killing any more black people.

“Oh, no,” he answered. “I was worn out.”