Prosecutors and the defense team in the federal trial of Dylann Roof rested their cases Wednesday following the harrowing testimony of an elderly retired nurse, who described in detail the alleged carnage she saw inside Charleston’s Emanuel AME Church in June 2015.
Roof, 22, declined to testify in his own defense, and his attorneys did not call any other witnesses. The Post and Courier reported Wednesday afternoon that jurors were sent home for the rest of the day, with closing arguments slated to begin Thursday morning.
The final witness for the prosecution was Polly Sheppard, 72, one of just three people to survive the June 17, 2015, shooting that killed nine people during Bible study at “Mother Emanuel,” the oldest black church in the South. Clutching a tissue in her hand, Sheppard told jurors how her pastor, the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, welcomed the young, white stranger into the fellowship hall that night.
Pinckney handed him a Bible and a handout with the week's Scripture passage on it, the Post and Courier reported. Less than an hour later, Pinckney and eight of his congregants were dead and Sheppard was cowering underneath a table, praying and watching Roof's boots as they moved closer and closer to her hiding place, according to testimony.
Roof reached her table and pointed his .45-caliber Glock handgun at her, Sheppard said.
“I was praying out loud,” she testified. “He told me to shut up.”
The newspaper reported that Roof asked Sheppard if she'd been shot. When she said she hadn't, she testified that he told her he would let her live so she could tell about what he'd done there that night.
Sheppard testified that she used a fellow congregant’s cell phone, which had fallen on the floor near her, to call 911.
Jurors heard that 911 call, in which Sheppard begged dispatchers to send help to Emanuel, where, she said, “He shot all the members of the church.”
The dispatcher told Sheppard to stay quiet and to remain on the phone.
"He's coming. He's coming. Please! He's reloading," Sheppard told the woman, according to the Post and Courier.
By the time police arrived, Roof had left through the same door through which he’d arrived, according to reports.
Jurors on Wednesday also heard from the medical examiner who conducted the autopsies on the nine people killed in the shooting. Their bodies sustained 60 bullet wounds in the massacre.
Each victim sustained at least five gunshot wounds, with several suffering shots to the heart. Susie Jackson, an 87-year-old who died alongside her great-nephew, was struck at least 10 times.
Jackson’s great-nephew, Tywanza Sanders, approached Roof during the shooting and, already wounded, told him they “meant him no harm,” Sanders’ mother, Felicia Sanders, testified earlier in the trial. Roof, who allegedly responded that black people “are raping our women and … taking over the world,” shot him five more times.
Roof, a self-described white nationalist, said in a statement to police the day after the slayings that he committed the crime in response to damage he claimed black people had inflicted on white society. In a two-hour, videotaped confession, Roof stated that “somebody had to do something, because, you know, black people are killing white people every day on the street and they’re raping white women.”
The defendant made similar statements in a handwritten journal found in his car after his capture in North Carolina, as well as in a manifesto posted on a website he’d established online.
Roof faces the death penalty if convicted of some of the 33 federal charges against him, including hate crime charges and charges of religious obstruction. If he is convicted, the penalty phase of the trial is scheduled to begin after the holidays, on Jan. 3.
Though he has allowed lawyers to defend him during the guilt phase of the trial, Roof plans to represent himself during the penalty phase.
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