Dylann Roof showed no remorse in writings while in jail

CHARLESTON, S.C. – In the weeks after his attack on black parishioners, 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 self-pity 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 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.

Judge: Roof competent to represent self in penalty phase

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 else, 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.

The dedicated father coaxed his girls to take piano lessons by stirring a passion for music, helped them on school projects and read to them in story times that in one moment ended with daughters tumbled against dad, all of them asleep on the couch, books on their chests.

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 the Rev. Pinckney, the man who welcomed the stranger to the Bible study and offered a seat next to him.

After his death, several co-workers told Jennifer Pinckney, a media specialist at a Columbia, South Carolina, elementary school, they did not know her husband was a state senator.

Had they known, they would have addressed him differently, they said. He wouldn’t have wanted that, the widow responded.

“He did not want his family in the media eye,” Pinckney said in court.

They have ended up there.

That night, with the group in the fellowship hall, Jennifer Pinckney and the couple’s youngest daughter, 6-year-old Malana, were in 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.

There, under the desk, she put her hand over the girl’s mouth. Malana, shaking slightly, raised her own palm to her mother’s lips, mimicking the gesture of silence.

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. 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. She told Malana she loved her, told her to tell her older sister the same.

But she returned, and a 911 dispatcher told her to stay under the desk until police arrived.

“I just want to know if my husband’s been killed,” Pinckney whispered.

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 have also lost her mother and younger 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.”

The afternoon ended with Rev. Anthony Thompson, married 16 years to 59-year-old Rev. Myra Thompson, who was leading the Bible study for the first time that evening.

He recounted how she had supported him in a decision to go to seminary, and helped strengthen a small church in Summerville, South Carolina, boosting membership to about 50 congregants, buying adjacent property and renovating the ailing building.

In Roof's self-defense, a constitutional quandary

When he moved to Charleston’s Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church, a building he first thought should be condemned, they did the same, strengthening the House of God.

A teacher in the Charleston County School District, the mother of two and grandmother had a gift for dealing with difficult youngsters in a profession she saw as calling, he said.

Prosecutors had earlier described Anthony Thompson as a man “who does not know what to do with himself now that she is gone,” and in testimony, that heartbreak came with the promise of a personal future, now lost.

At their last anniversary, they talked of moving to Charlotte to be nearer her grandchildren, and the couple made a pact.

“January of this year, that’s what we’d be doing,” the widower said, his voice breaking. “I never thought that she wouldn’t be here.”

Later, Thompson described his wife leaving the house to lead the Bible study, missing their typical goodbye kiss. A phone call came later, saying there was a shooting at the church and Thompson made his way past law enforcement officers, before someone stopped him near the church door.

“I need to go in there. You need to let me go right now,” Thompson said, and when he could not get an answer asked, “Is she suffering or is she gone?”

“He said, ‘I don’t know.’”

“I just lost it,” he said. “For the first time I lost control. I never lost control about anything. My world was gone, just gone. I just didn’t know what to do,” he said, breaking into tears. “I still don’t know what to do.”