CHARLESTON, S.C. — One of just three survivors of last year’s massacre at a historic black church tearfully recounted the merciless bloodbath in testimony against shooter Dylann Roof, calling the man who shot her son dead, “evil as can be.”
Felicia Sanders, the first witness at Roof’s federal death-penalty trial, which got underway Wednesday, said the avowed white supremacist opened fire while she and other worshippers — who had welcomed him in with open arms — had their eyes closed in prayer near the end of a Bible study session.
“As I heard the defendant shooting … I grabbed my grand-baby, and she was saying, ‘Granny, Granny, I’m so scared, I’m just so scared,’” Sanders testified.
“I said, ‘Play dead.’ I muzzled her face to my body so tight I thought I suffocated her,” she said of her then-11-year-old granddaughter.
As they lay on the floor, Sanders said, “I could feel the warm blood flowing on each side,” from the dead and dying all around them.
She also described the horror that followed when her wounded son, Tywanza Sanders, 26, asked the baby-faced killer, “Why are you doing this?”
“The defendant over there — with his head hanging down, refusing to look at me — said, ‘I have to do this. Y’all are raping our white women. Y’all are taking over the world,’” Sanders said.
“That’s when he put about five bullets in my son,” she testified, before heartbreakingly noting, “I watched my son come into this world and I watched my son leave this world.”
Roof, clad in a gray prison jumpsuit, never once had the nerve to look her in the eye as she bravely recounted his rampage.
Sanders — one of just three people to survive the bloodbath, along with her granddaughter and a woman Roof told he was leaving alive as a witness — said she was “just waiting on my turn … from a man we thought was looking for the Lord” when he showed up at the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston.
“He just sat there the whole time, evil, evil, evil as can be,” she said.
Relatives of the nine victims sobbed and prayed in the courtroom gallery during Sander’s testimony, and several jurors fought back tears.
Sanders, 59, faced a brief cross-examination question, during which she was asked by Roof’s lawyer if she heard the killer say he was only 21 and planned to kill himself.
“I was counting on that. He’s evil. There’s no place on Earth for him, except in the pit of Hell,” she answered, prompting several spectators to murmur “Mm-hmm.”
During opening statements, defense lawyer David Bruck conceded that the case against Roof was “open and shut,” and said the only remaining question was his punishment.
“Remember, life means life in prison,” Bruck told jurors.
Roof, now 22, offered to plead guilty before trial in exchange for a life sentence, but prosecutors turned down the deal.
Assistant US Attorney Jay Richardson told jurors that Roof fully confessed to the June 17, 2015, slaughter, in which the first victim was the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, a Democratic state senator who had given his killer a Bible, a study guide and a seat beside him.
Roof carried out the fiendish attack with a semi-automatic pistol that he coolly reloaded with fresh magazines, Richardson said.
“He pulled the trigger on that Glock .45 more than 70 times that night. More than 60 times he hit parishioners,” the prosecutor said.
When he finally ran out of bullets, Roof told one woman, Polly Sheppard, that he was leaving her alive “to tell his story,” Richardson said.
Sheppard is scheduled to be the government’s final witness during the first phase of the trial. Roof has said he plans to act as his own lawyer during the second phase, when jurors will decide his fate.
Roof perpetrated the mass murder after scouting the South’s oldest AME church for months, stockpiling ammo and practicing shooting the gun he bought in 2015, Richardson said.
Before heading to the church, Roof typed out an online manifesto that the prosecutor described as a “call to arms” directed at white people.
Two female spectators collapsed after the opening statements, with paramedics taking one — a victim’s relative who fell ill in a side room — for hospital treatment, officials said.
The other, an unidentified white woman who slumped over on a courtroom bench, was treated at the scene.
At one point, Roof’s mother, who was watching the proceedings, collapsed in court and had to be taken out.
The openings came after lawyers picked 18 potential jurors, with court officials describing 12 of them as white, five as black and one as “other.” The 12 who will decide the case won’t learn who they are until right before deliberations.
Other witnesses included Charleston police Sgt. John Lites, who was among the first cops at the scene and said Tywanza Sanders “sat up just a little bit and said, ‘I’ve been shot.’”
“While I was talking to him, he grabbed my hand, he kind of squeezed and smiled, then passed away,” he said.
Charleston police Sgt. Justin Kniess described finding bodies and “just chaos” when he showed up. His body-cam footage was played in court, and showed Kneiss walking past a lifeless victim as Sanders wailed, “My baby dead! My baby dead! My baby gone! My baby gone!”
Roof is being tried on federal hate-crime and obstruction-of-religion charges, but even if he cheats death, he still faces capital punishment on nine state counts of murder set for trial in January.
The prosecutor in the state case — Ninth Circuit Solicitor Scarlett Wilson, who on Monday got a hung jury in last year’s racially charged, police killing of Walter Scott — was among the courtroom spectators.