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Trial of Dylann Roof, Suspect in Charleston Church Killings, Begins
Heart-Rending Testimony as Dylann Roof Trial Opens
(about 7 hours later)
CHARLESTON, S.C. — Faced with perhaps his only chance to persuade jurors to spare the life of Dylann S. Roof, the avowed white supremacist accused of killing nine black parishioners attending a Bible study class last year, a defense lawyer used his opening statement on Wednesday to concede Mr. Roof’s guilt, suggest doubts about his stability and argue for a sentence of life in prison.
CHARLESTON, S.C. — She recalled watching the young white man stroll into Bible study, thinking he just wanted to seek the word of God. He was handed a Bible and a worksheet about that Wednesday night’s lesson, the parable of the sower, and took a seat next to the pastor. He said nothing for nearly 45 minutes, hanging his head and waiting for the 12 parishioners to stand and close their eyes in benediction.
“In fairness and in mercy, our society does not invoke the death penalty if there are reasons to choose life, a life in prison,” said the lawyer, David I. Bruck, the leader of the court-appointed defense team that Mr. Roof plans to jettison during the anticipated second phase of his federal trial, when jurors will decide whether he should be executed.
Then Felicia Sanders heard the first startling boom, she said, as Dylann S. Roof removed a Glock .45-caliber handgun from his fanny pack and methodically shot one African-American worshiper after the next, nine in all, starting with the pastor of Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney.
“We err in favor of life,” Mr. Bruck said softly as Mr. Roof, dressed in the striped uniform of the county jail, sat silently, staring down at the defense table. “We do not behave like the person who committed this crime.”
Before it ended, 77 hollow-point rounds later, Ms. Sanders, the first witness to testify in Mr. Roof’s federal death penalty trial on Wednesday, found herself underneath a table muzzling her 11-year-old granddaughter so hard she feared she would suffocate her. Her wounded son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, had already fallen on one side of her; her aunt, Susie Jackson, 87, lay dead on the other. She rubbed her leg in the blood pooling on the linoleum floor so the gunman might think she and her granddaughter were dead.
Earlier, the lead prosecutor, Julius N. Richardson, an assistant United States attorney, introduced each of the nine victims of the shooting at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church, showing their photographs, describing their lives and explaining how they had come to gather in the church’s fellowship hall on the night of June 17, 2015. But he spent much of his time discussing Mr. Roof, 22, who has been charged with 33 federal counts and also faces a separate death penalty trial in state court.
As Mr. Roof made his way out of the church that unholy night, June 17, 2015, Mr. Sanders moved toward Ms. Jackson, begging for water because he could not breathe.
“We will prove to you that the defendant’s attack was cold and calculating,” said Mr. Richardson, whose presentation emphasized the defendant’s premeditation.
“When he reached Aunt Susie,” Ms. Sanders wailed from the witness stand, dabbing at her eyes with a tissue, “he grabbed a handful of her hair and took his last breath. I watched my son come in this world and I watched my son leave this world.”
“It was done with malice in his heart, in his mind,” Mr. Richardson said, “racist retribution for perceived offenses against the white race.”
Ms. Sanders’s heart-rending account opened testimony in United States District Court after Mr. Roof’s lawyer began to argue for a sentence of life in prison for the 22-year-old avowed white supremacist. Faced with perhaps his only chance to persuade the jury to spare Mr. Roof’s life, the lawyer, David I. Bruck, used his opening statement to concede Mr. Roof’s guilt and suggest doubts about his stability.
Mr. Richardson, speaking methodically with composed indignation, said that Mr. Roof, who confessed after his arrest, staged his attack after months of planning because he had grown convinced that “white supremacy groups were just talk.”
“In fairness and in mercy, our society does not invoke the death penalty if there are reasons to choose life, a life in prison,” said Mr. Bruck, the leader of the court-appointed defense team that Mr. Roof plans to jettison during a second phase of the trial, when jurors will decide whether he should be executed. “We do not behave like the person who committed this crime.”
And so on a Wednesday night, after sitting with his targets and studying the parable of the sower for almost an hour, Mr. Roof opened fire with a Glock .45-caliber handgun as they bowed their heads in benediction.
Mr. Roof, dressed in the striped uniform of the county jail, sat expressionless, staring down at the defense table, as he did throughout more than seven hours in court.
“The defendant left behind a scene that nobody can fathom, yet he walked out calmly, looking both ways as he exited,” Mr. Richardson said.
Earlier, the lead prosecutor, Julius N. Richardson, an assistant United States attorney, introduced each of the nine victims, showing the jurors their photographs, describing their lives and explaining how they came to gather in the church’s fellowship hall that night. But he spent much of his 49-minute opening statement emphasizing Mr. Roof’s deliberateness and premeditation.
Mr. Bruck made no effort to dispute Mr. Richardson’s summary of the case. “The story Mr. Richardson just finished telling you really did occur,” he said. “Dylann Roof really is the person.”
“We will prove to you that the defendant’s attack was cold and calculating,” Mr. Richardson said. “It was done with malice in his heart, in his mind, racist retribution for perceived offenses against the white race.”
Mr. Roof’s case is being heard by a jury of 18, including six alternates. The panel consists of 13 whites and five blacks. Thirteen of the jurors are women; five are men.
Mr. Richardson told the jury that the prosecution would prove that Mr. Roof was well aware of the historic church’s significance to the African-American community and that he intended the attack as a racial call to arms. Founded in 1818, the downtown church, known here as Mother Emanuel, is one of the oldest independent black congregations in the South and played central roles in the plotting of a failed slave revolt in 1822 and in civil rights activities 140 years later.
Although they are expected to spend days hearing gruesome testimony — Felicia Sanders, a survivor of the attack, began her testimony on Wednesday — the focus of the trial will come once the jury decides Mr. Roof’s guilt or innocence. If Mr. Roof is found guilty, the panel will turn its attention to sentencing.
Ms. Sanders testified that her wounded son managed to tell Mr. Roof that he did not need to continue shooting, that they meant him no harm. “I have to do this,” she quoted the gunman as responding, “because y’all are raping our women and y’all are taking over our world.” That, she said, was “when he put about five bullets in my son. I couldn’t move. I was just waiting on my turn.”
The Justice Department announced in May that it would seek a death sentence for Mr. Roof, and rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life in prison. The government’s decision has been the subject of some skepticism in South Carolina, where survivors of the attack and many family members of the victims opposed the death penalty.
Mr. Roof is charged with 33 counts, including hate crimes resulting in death, and also faces a death penalty trial in state court that is scheduled for mid-January. Federal prosecutors rejected his offer to plead guilty in exchange for a sentence of life without parole.
Mr. Roof and his defense team have been at uneasy odds over the lawyers’ desire to try to save his life by presenting evidence of mental instability. After a week of legal wrangling, Judge Richard M. Gergel of Federal District Court agreed to Mr. Roof’s request that Mr. Bruck and his team represent him during the initial guilt phase of the trial and that he represent himself during the subsequent penalty phase.
His victims included Mr. Pinckney, 41, who was also a state senator; Ms. Jackson, a church matriarch who sang in the choir; Mr. Sanders, a recent college graduate and aspiring poet; the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a high school speech pathologist and track coach; Cynthia Hurd, 54, a county library manager; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, a longtime church member and sexton; the Rev. DePayne Middleton-Doctor, 49, a college enrollment counselor; the Rev. Daniel Lee Simmons Sr., 74, a retired pastor who filled in part-time at the church; and Myra Thompson, 59, an English teacher and guidance counselor.
Knowing he would be sidelined when he normally could present evidence of Mr. Roof’s family background and psychological history, Mr. Bruck — one of the country’s foremost capital defenders — used his opening statement to plant notions that the rampage was the work of a disturbed man. He asked jurors to “go deeper than the surface of this awful crime.”
Two adults and a child survived in the fellowship hall, along with Mr. Pinckney’s wife and their younger daughter, who were hiding in his adjacent study. The gunman fled in his black Hyundai Elantra and was captured without incident the next day in North Carolina with the murder weapon in his back seat.
“Ask yourself if this really is a logical plan at all,” Mr. Bruck said. “On what planet does someone have to be to think you could advance a political agenda by attacking these nine people who are the most kind, upstanding — I will use the word noble — people you could possibly find in this community or any other.
Police officers and other emergency workers testified Wednesday of finding an unimaginable scene. Footage from a police sergeant’s body camera showed them trying to determine the number of casualties.
“What is the likely effect of that? Ask yourself that. How much sense does this crime make; does it make any sense at all, and if not, what does that tell you?”
“We’ve got one, two, three, four, five, five, six, seven, eight, make that eight,” one officer counted as he surveyed the room.
Mr. Richardson’s 49-minute statement yielded few revelations about the attack, in which Mr. Roof fired 77 times, hurling racial insults as he shot one victim after the next.
Mr. Bruck made no effort to dispute the thrust of the prosecution’s case. “The story Mr. Richardson just finished telling you really did occur,” he said. “Dylann Roof really is the person.”
The dead included the church’s pastor, Clementa C. Pinckney, 41, who was also a state senator, three other members of the ministerial staff and five church regulars. One by one, Mr. Richardson talked about the victims: the Rev. Sharonda Coleman-Singleton, 45, a high school speech pathologist and track coach; Cynthia Hurd, 54, a county library manager; Susie Jackson, 87, a church matriarch who sang in the choir; Ethel Lee Lance, 70, a longtime church member and sexton; the Rev. DePayne Middleton Doctor, 49, a college enrollment counselor; Tywanza Sanders, 26, a recent college graduate; the Rev. Daniel Simmons Sr., 74, a retired pastor who filled in part-time at the church; and Myra Thompson, 59, an English teacher and guidance counselor.
The jury of 18, including six alternates, that was selected Wednesday morning consists of 12 whites, five blacks and one who identifies as “other.” Thirteen are women and five are men.
The boyish gunman fled in his black Hyundai Elantra and was captured without incident the next day in North Carolina. Two women and a child survived the blood bath in the church’s ground floor fellowship hall, while Mr. Pinckney’s wife and younger daughter escaped by hiding in his adjacent office.
Mr. Roof and his defense team have been at uneasy odds for a month over the lawyers’ desire to try to save his life by presenting evidence of mental instability. After a week of legal wrangling, Judge Richard M. Gergel agreed to Mr. Roof’s request that Mr. Bruck and his team represent him during the guilt phase but that he represent himself during the penalty phase.
The opening of the trial came with the city’s race relations already on edge two days after a judge declared a mistrial in the case of Michael T. Slager, the former North Charleston police officer who shot an unarmed black man as a bystander recorded the confrontation on video. The deadlocked jury in that trial, held across Broad Street in the Charleston County courthouse, consisted of 11 whites and one African-American.
Knowing he would be sidelined when allowed to present evidence of Mr. Roof’s family background and psychological history, Mr. Bruck, one of the country’s foremost capital defenders, used his opening statement to plant notions that the rampage was the work of a disturbed man.
Mr. Roof’s lawyers asked Judge Gergel late Tuesday afternoon to delay his trial out of concern that the federal jury might try to compensate. “The risk that the defendant’s soon-to-be-empaneled jury will feel pressure to respond to widespread frustration and anxiety aroused by the Slager mistrial is too great to ignore,” they wrote. Judge Gergel quickly rejected the request, calling it “utterly far-fetched and illogical.”
“On what planet does someone have to be to think you could advance a political agenda by attacking these nine people who are the most kind, upstanding — I will use the world noble — people you could possibly find in this community or any other,” Mr. Bruck told the jury. “Does it make any sense at all and, if not, what does that tell you?”
By midmorning on Wednesday, 18 months after the shootings devastated the 198-year-old congregation and its city, the case against Mr. Roof — conducted to date on paper in 768 docket entries, many of them sealed — finally began to unfold in open court. Although prosecutors have made plain that they believe the attack was racially motivated, many here, including Mr. Roof’s lawyers, have expressed hope that the proceedings might provide additional insight into his motivations.
He also tried to focus the jury on Mr. Roof’s youth. In his only question to Ms. Sanders, he asked if Mr. Roof had said at some point that he was 21 years old. He had, she said. Then she added that Mr. Roof had said he was going to kill himself. “I was counting on that,” she said, glaring at him. “He is evil. There is no place for him except the pit of hell.”
In a white supremacist online manifesto discovered shortly after the massacre, Mr. Roof, who lived in Eastover, near Columbia, said that he had chosen Charleston because it was the state’s most historic city and for many years — until the 20th century — had a substantial black majority. But what was not revealed was how he came to target the church known as Mother Emanuel, one of the oldest independent black congregations in the South, where a failed slave revolt was incubated in 1822 and where visitors to the pulpit have included Booker T. Washington in 1909 and the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. in 1962.
“Well aware of Mother Emanuel’s significance to the African-American community he chose that church because of the impact it would have and the manner in which it would resonate across the nation,” Mr. Richardson said.
But when Mr. Roof appeared at the church around the time of the Wednesday night Bible study, Mr. Richardson said, no one perceived him as a threat.
“They welcomed the defendant, Dylann Storm Roof,” Mr. Richardson said. “He seemed to the 12 to be harmless.”
