Alleged gunman ‘did not want to be captured alive’
BROOKHAVEN: A man who got into an argument with his estranged wife and her family over his children was arrested on Sunday in a house-to-house shooting rampage in rural Mississippi that left eight people dead, including his mother-in-law and a sheriff’s deputy.
“I ain’t fit to live, not after what I done,” a handcuffed Willie Corey Godbolt, 35, told The Clarion-Ledger.
The gunfire erupted on Saturday night at Mr Godbolt’s in-laws’ home in Bogue Chitto after the deputy arrived in response to a domestic disturbance call, and spread to two houses in nearby Brookhaven.
Mr Godbolt was hospitalised in good condition with a gunshot wound, though it wasn’t clear who shot him.
The slain deputy, William Durr, was a two-year sheriff’s department veteran and former police officer in Brookhaven.
Mississippi Bureau of Investigation spokesman Warren Strain said prosecutors plan to charge Mr Godbolt with murder. Authorities gave no details on his relationship to the victims, but a member of Mr Godbolt’s church said everyone but the deputy was related to Mr Godbolt by blood or marriage.
Mr Godbolt himself shed some light on what happened, in an interview he gave to the newspaper as he sat with his hands cuffed behind his back on the side of a road.
“My pain wasn’t designed for him. He was just there,” Mr Godbolt said of the deputy. “I was having a conversation with her stepdaddy and her mama and her, my wife, about me taking my children home.
“Somebody called the officer, people that didn’t even live at the house. That’s what they do. They intervene.
“They cost him his life,” he said, apparently referring to Durr. “I’m sorry.”
Mr Godbolt’s stepfather-in-law, Vincent Mitchell, said Mr Godbolt’s wife and their two children had been staying at his Bogue Chitto home for about three weeks after she left her husband because of domestic violence.
“He’d come to get his kids. The deputy was called,” Mr Mitchell said. The deputy asked Mr Godbolt to leave.
“He acted like, motioned like, he was fixing to go. Then he reached in his back pocket and grabbed a gun,” Mr Mitchell said. “He just started shooting everything.”
Mr Mitchell said he escaped along with Mr Godbolt’s wife, but three others were killed: his wife, her sister and one of the wife’s daughters.
After fleeing his in-laws’ house, Mr Godbolt killed four more people at two other homes, authorities said. At least seven hours elapsed between the first shootings and Mr Godbolt’s arrest near the final crime scene, a few kilometres away.
“It breaks everybody’s heart,” said Garrett Smith, a 19-year-old college student who went to high school with one of the victims. “Everybody knows everybody for the most part.”
Mr Godbolt said he did not intend for police to capture him alive. “My intentions was to have God kill me. I ran out of bullets,” he said. “Suicide by cop was my intention.”