Roof shows no remorse in jail writings
‘I feel pity that I had to do what I did,’ shooter says
In the weeks after his attack on black parishioners at a Charleston church, Dylann Roof reflected on the shootings as he sat in the county jail.
He was not sorry, the admitted white supremacist wrote on lined paper.
“I would like to make it crystal clear I do not regret what I did. I am not sorry. I have not shed a tear for the innocent people I killed,” he wrote, and later continued: “I have shed a tear of selfpity for myself. I feel pity that I had to do what I did in the first place.”
Officials found the writings in Roof ’s jail cell six weeks after his rampage at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston, prosecutors told a jury Wednesday in an opening statement of the trial’s sentencing phase.
For that lack of remorse, for his racially charged motive, for the impact it had on families, Roof deserves the death penalty, Nathan Williams, an assistant U.S. attorney, told the panel during his 30-minute address.
In his own opening statement, one that lasted less than three minutes, Roof offered no direct response to the prosecutor. The only remorse he hinted at was regret that his former defense team twice asked the court to evaluate his competency.
Roof, 22, said after the shootings that he had intended to start a race war. He chose to serve as his own attorney in order to keep his team of lawyers, now relegated to the role of standby counselors, from presenting a defense based on mental health.
“But it’s not because I have a mental illness that I don’t want you to know about. It isn’t because I’m trying to keep a secret from you,” Roof told the jurors. “Eventually those will become part of the public record. In that respect, my self-representation accomplishes nothing. So you could say what’s the point? The point is that I’m not going to lie to you, either myself or through anyone else.”
He asked jurors to forget anything his attorney told them earlier, a reference to David Bruck’s attempts during last month’s guilt phase to signal to jurors that Roof suffers from an undisclosed mental defect.
“I know none of it is worth remembering anyway,” Roof said.
And aside from occasionally offering a “no objection” as prosecutors submitted new evidence or “no questions” when invited to cross examine witnesses, Roof said almost nothing, though he did offer one objection, which was sustained.
The government began its witnesses — a list that could number near 40 in coming days — with Jennifer Pinckney, the widow of Mother Emanuel’s leader, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney.
For an hour and a half, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jay Richardson led the mother of two young girls through a picture of an idyllic family life that began with a marriage in 1999 and soon was populated by vacations in Seattle or Salt Lake City and comfortable evenings at home.
That picturesque life ended on June 17, 2015, when Roof joined the small gathering of parishioners at Mother Emanuel, waiting until the group bowed their heads in prayer. As they did, Roof pulled a Glock .45 from a utility pouch and took aim at Pinckney, the man who welcomed the stranger to the Bible study and offered a seat next to him.
That night, with the group in the fellowship hall, Jennifer Pinckney and the couple’s youngest daughter, 6-year-old Malana, were at an adjacent pastor’s study when the mother heard pops.
She thought at first it might be a faulty generator, and cracked open the door before realizing the cracks were gunshots. She locked the door and moved her daughter back to a connected secretary’s office, locking that door as well.
Pinckney sat with her daughter under a desk, and as a child she has earlier described as rambunctious, sometimes challenging, questioned the gunfire, the mother’s words turned sharp in a tone she had never used with the girl: “I just told her, ‘Shut up. Don’t say anything. You have to be quiet.’ ”
“Mama, is daddy going to die?” Malana said.
At one point, a bullet came through the office, and soon the gunfire neared. Pinckney heard a grunting sound. She wondered if it was her husband.
“I heard Mr. Roof say, ‘I’m not crazy. I had to do this,’ ” Pinckney told the jury. And then he tried the door, sending a chill over her. But he did not enter and seemed to move away.
Earlier, Pinckney had tried to call out from the secretary’s phone, but in the darkness could not see the numbers, and she feared the shooter had already heard its loud tone. She needed to leave her child to get to her husband’s phone, in the pastor’s study.
“If he gets in this room, you do not come from under this desk regardless of what happens to mama,” Pinckney said to the child.
When police arrived, an officer gathered Malana, making a game of telling the child to shut her eyes tight and bury her head against the officer’s collarbone, that she might be carried through the bloodshed.
That night, the widow told her girls that daddy was killed, but would always be with them, that they would always talk about daddy.
Had that doorknob turned, her 11-year-old might also have lost her mother and older sister, Pinckney told jurors.
“It wasn’t my time or my daughter’s time,” Pinckney said when a prosecutor asked her why she believed she survived. “God is a just God and I don’t see God taking both parents from two small kids.”