Pizza shop gunman regrets his strategy

But N.C. man won’t dismiss false claims of child sex ring.

WASHINGTON — A man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant targeted by fake news stories alleging it was the headquarters of a politically connected child sex ring said he regrets how he handled the situation but refused to completely dismiss the false online claims that brought him there.

“I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” Edgar Maddison Welch, who has been jailed since his Sunday arrest, told The New York Times in a Wednesday videoconference.

Welch, 28, told the newspaper he started driving to Washington from his Salisbury, N.C., home intending only to give the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant a “closer look.” But while on the way, he said he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering” because of the sex ring, which the fake stories claimed was run by Hillary Clinton and her presidential campaign manager, John Podesta.

Welch would not say why he brought an AR-15 into the pizza shop and fired it, the newspaper reported. No one was injured.

Asked what he thought when he found there were no children in the restaurant, Welch said: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” But he would not completely dismiss the online claims, conceding only that there were no children “inside that dwelling.”

Welch appears to have lived an aimless life that became turbulent in the weeks before he was drawn to the nation’s capital by the fake news stories.

Friends and family say he is a well-meaning father of two girls who wanted to be a firefighter.

But he also unnerved some with his religious fervor and sometimes had trouble detaching himself from the internet.

In the weeks before his Washington arrest, there were other disturbing signs. In late October, Welch struck a teenage pedestrian with his car in his hometown, causing injuries severe enough that the boy was airlifted to a hospital, according to a police report. He was not immediately charged.

More recently, days before he drove to Washington, he was dropped from the rolls of a volunteer fire department.

In Washington, court documents say Welch fired an AR-15 rifle multiple times inside the restaurant but later exited with his hands up. He told police “he had read online that the Comet restaurant was harboring child sex slaves,” and he wanted to investigate.

SATHI SOMA / VIA ASSOCIATED PRESS Edgar Maddison Welch surrenders Sunday to Washington, D.C., police after he fired an assault rifle inside a pizza restaurant.