Tonya Maxwell

Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times

CHARLESTON, S.C. — In a chilling confession to police, Dylann Roof laughed as he detailed walking into a historically black church on a mission to kill, according to a videotaped interview shown to jurors at Roof's murder trail Friday.

“I am guilty. We all know I’m guilty,” Roof said, then laughed.

In the video, Roof described sitting in the Wednesday night study group at Mother Emanuel, silent for about 15 minutes, and told agents he wavered on the decision to shoot parishioners.

“I just finally decided I had to do it,” he told agents at one point, and at another, “It was going back and forth in my mind, it was like a jerk, a jerk reaction.”

Throughout the video, Roof laughs, though it’s unclear if his laughter reflected humor, darkness or something in between.

He admitted he targeted Mother Emanuel because he wanted a small area where black people congregate, and said he didn’t carry out an attack on a black neighborhood or on black drug dealers because, alone, he was not equipped for such an assault.

But for all the certainty he claimed about the superiority of the white race and a world that harkens back to the Jim Crow era, he seemed at several points to be unsure of his goals.

“When I got in there it was not really about how many I could kill,” he said. “After I shot some, I didn’t feel like I needed to shoot everybody.”

He wavered too when agents pressed him on what he intended to accomplish and what he thought would happen because of the shooting, with Roof saying he didn’t want to start a race war and thought one would be pretty terrible.

However, a handwritten journal taken from Roof's car indicated he would like to see a race war, as would any white nationalist.

At moments Roof had trouble remembering details, that it was June instead of July and that he was being interviewed on a Thursday, as well as his actions in the days before the shooting.

He was also unsure of the number of people shot, though he said he didn’t intentionally shoot anyone in the head.

He believed two women survived; maybe five were dead.

Later when agents revealed the deceased numbered nine, Roof’s reaction matched his description of walking out of the church and not encountering officers. For a second time in the video, he expressed surprise.

“There wasn’t even nine people there,” Roof told the agents. “Are you guys lying to me?”

They were not. How did he feel about that?

“Well, it makes me feel bad,” he said.