Alleged pizza shop gunman says he regrets how he handled the situation
SALISBURY, N.C. — The man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant said he regrets how he handled the situation but refused to completely dismiss the false online claims involving a child sex ring that brought him there.
“I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” Edgar Maddison Welch, who’s 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.”
Asked what he thought when he found there were no children in the restaurant, Welch said: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.”
Welch appears to have lived an aimless life that became turbulent in the weeks before he was drawn to the nation’s capital by a fake news story.
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 late October, Welch struck a teenage pedestrian with his car in his hometown, requiring the boy to be airlifted to a hospital, according to a police report that said he wasn’t immediately charged. More recently, days before he drove to Washington, he was dropped from the rolls of a volunteer fire department.
In past years, he was convicted of drunken driving and minor drug charges.
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. Welch faces charges including assault with a dangerous weapon.
On Thursday, a judge delayed a preliminary hearing for Welch. His public defender requested the delay, saying she needed more time to investigate the case. He will be back in court Tuesday.