‘I had to do it’, says US murder suspect
>> CHARLESTON: Shortly after being arrested and about 17 hours after he shot up the fellowship hall at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, Dylann Roof sat at an oval conference table with two FBI agents and confessed — calmly, clinically, occasionally chortling — to killing nine people who he acknowledged could not have been more innocent.
In a recording of the interview played on Friday during Mr Roof’s death penalty trial in the US District Court in Charleston, he expressed surprise when the agents told him how many had been killed.
“I wouldn’t believe you,” he said after one first suggested that nine people had died. “There wasn’t even nine people there. Are you guys lying to me?”
Mr Roof, 21 at the time, told the agents he was astonished to find the church parking lot not swarming with police when he exited a side door at 9.06pm on June 17, 2015.
He said he had saved one of eight magazines for his Glock semi-automatic handgun, loaded with hollow-point bullets bought at Wal-Mart, so he could kill himself if confronted by police.
Given that many mass killers do take their own lives, or are shot dead by police, Mr Roof’s extensive interview offered a rare courtroom glimpse into the mind of someone accused of such a rampage.
Mr Roof answered the agents’ questions eagerly in a matter-of-fact tone, his voice deeper than might be expected from his boyish appearance. He did not so much express remorse as depict his actions as necessary to retaliate for what he perceived as an epidemic of black-on-white crime.
“I regret doing it a little bit,” he said, before the agents revealed to him the body count, which Roof had guessed was perhaps four or five. Once they did, and prompted him for his reaction, he said, “It makes me feel bad,” but there was little emotion in his voice. “I wouldn’t say I’m glad I did it,” he said. “I’ve done it, so” — he paused — “I had to do it.”
When one of the agents asked if he hoped to be a martyr, he answered, “Well, that would be nice, sure, but I didn’t know if that’s what would happen.”
The two-hour interview took place at a police station in Shelby, North Carolina, where Mr Roof had been arrested without incident the morning after the killings. He had been freed of his handcuffs and fortified with a hamburger provided by the Shelby officers.
Mr Roof is charged with 33 federal counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, and he is being tried only because the Justice Department rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. He also faces separate capital murder charges in a state trial scheduled for mid-January.
The racial rationale Mr Roof provided to two FBI agents, Michael E Stansbury and Craig Januchowski, closely resembled the online manifesto he is alleged to have written shortly before the killings and a journal found afterward in his car.
“Well, I had to do it because somebody had to do something because, you know, black people are killing white people every day on the streets, and they rape white women, 100 white women a day,” he told the agents. “The fact of the matter is what I did is so minuscule to what they’re doing to white people every day, all the time.”
Mr Roof, who noted the declining influence of hate groups like the Ku Klux Klan, said: “Nobody else is brave enough to do anything about it.”
Mr Roof, who is from Eastover, near Columbia, said in the interview that he had selected Emanuel, which was founded in 1818, because he knew it was historic and that he would find a concentration of African-Americans worshipping there.
He said he did not know anything specific about its history and denied that his choice had any connection to the racial outcry surrounding the shooting of a black motorist by a white police officer in North Charleston two months earlier.
He also made it clear that the Wednesday night Bible study session provided an easy target.
“Well it’s like this, you see, I’m not in the position, you know, by myself, you know, to go into like a black neighborhood, you know, or something like that and shoot up, you know, drug dealers or something like that,” he said. “You know what I’m saying? That’s not going to do anything. You see what I’m saying. I had to go somewhere else.”
Mr Roof said he hoped his attack would agitate race relations and awaken white Americans to the notion that they are “second-class citizens”. He said his “racial awareness” had been inspired by a Google search of the phrase “black on white crime”.
“That was it,” he said.