‘I Was Just Waiting on My Turn’

On one side of Felicia Sanders lay her son; on the other, her beloved aunt Susie Jackson. Beneath her, she clutched her 11-year-old granddaughter nearly to the point of smothering the child.

Around them, the air cracked with gunfire, Sanders told a jury Wednesday.

“There was so many shots.”

“There was so many shots,” Sanders testified in the federal government’s case against Dylann Roof, on trial for killing nine congregants at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in June 2015. “There was so many shots.”

Less than an hour earlier, the group of black church members had welcomed the 21-year-old Roof to their study group, giving him a Bible and a paper guide as they contemplated a parable in the Book of Mark. The stranger chuckled once when someone related a funny story, Sanders said, but mostly he sat unmoving, head hanging.

Just as eyes closed in prayer, a sound rang out, Sanders said, beginning a wrenching account of a series of deaths of her family by church and her family by blood relation. It started with the death of the Rev. Clementa Pinckney, also a state senator, and ended as she watched her 26-year-old son, Tywanza Sanders, die.

Sanders was called as the first witness in the case against Roof, one that prosecutors said would show he planned the killings for months, choosing to target both Charleston and Mother Emanuel for their place in black history in an effort to spread a message of white supremacy.

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In response to the opening statement from a federal prosecutor, one that outlined Roof’s racist ideology, the shootings of that night, and the search for a killer, defense attorney David Bruck indicated he would offer little argument to the government’s account.

He said he would have few questions for prosecution witnesses. He might not offer any of his own, he said.

“What you just heard really did happen,” the attorney said of a client who has entered a “not guilty” plea — but had previously offered to plead guilty, should the federal government drop its pursuit of the death penalty. Prosecutors have declined that offer.

Monday began with the seating of a jury that will determine Roof’s guilt or innocence.

The panel includes 12 jurors and six alternates, though which members sit on the regular and reserve panel has not been disclosed. The group of 18 includes three black women, two black men, 10 white women, and three white men.

Prosecutors offered Sanders as their first witness. She opened by describing several of the victims: The Rev. Daniel Simmons was the backbone of the church, one who always saw to it that the Bible study was organized, even when he was ailing; Ethel Lee Lance, at 70, had a walk about her, a swagger; Cynthia Hurd, whose name caused Sanders to pause with regret.

 “I said, ‘If you loved me, you would stay at Bible study.'”

“I asked Cynthia to stay at Bible study. I feel bad at that,” Sanders said, her voice cracking at her memory of her friend’s plans to leave. “I said, ‘If you loved me, you would stay at Bible study.'”

The coaxing persuaded Hurd, a 54-year-old Charleston city librarian, to remain with a group that bowed heads in prayer until the confusing blasts rattled the room.

Pinckney was shot first, Sanders yelling, “He has a gun,” as Simmons, 74, rushed to the church leader.

“Let me check on my pastor. I need to check on my pastor,” she remembered him saying, before Roof shot him.

The remaining group dove under tables, Sanders finding herself between her aunt and son, who was shot.

“I grabbed my grandbaby and she was saying: ‘Granny I’m so scared. Granny, I’m so scared.’ I said, ‘Just play dead,'” Sanders testified. “I muzzled her face to my body so tight that I thought I suffocated her because I didn’t want her to make a sound.”

Sanders felt the warmth of blood pooling on the floor and positioned herself so it would look like she was injured, and soon heard Roof speaking to Polly Sheppard, asking if she had been shot.

At the question, an injured Tywanza Sanders rose, drawing attention away from Sheppard, then 70 years old.

Sanders heard her son ask, “Why are you doing this?” and Roof answered: “I have to do this. You are taking our women and you are taking over the world.”

The young black man countered: “You don’t have to do this. We mean you no harm.”

“That’s when he put five bullets in my son,” Sanders said.

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“I couldn’t move. I was just waiting on my turn. I was just waiting on my turn,” Sanders said, though the shooter left, leaving her, the child, and Sheppard alive.

Though mortally injured, Tywanza Sanders pulled himself toward Jackson, determined to help his elderly aunt, even as his mother begged him to be still and, along with Sheppard, tried to help him.

“We watched him take his last breath,” Sanders said. “I watched my son come into this world and watched my son leave this world.”

Throughout the day’s opening statements and testimony, Roof appeared to stare at the table before him, showing no emotion, and did not seem to acknowledge the proceedings around him.

His lack of eye contact once drew frustration from Sanders, who twice noted that the defendant sat unmoving, unable to look at her.

“There were 77 shots in that room from someone we thought was there for the Lord,” she said. “He just sat there the whole time — evil, evil.”

In a brief cross-examination, defense attorney Bruck tried to draw from her that Roof amid the shooting said he was 21 years old, that he planned to kill himself as well. But the woman offered another statement, one that counters a narrative of forgiveness that began with Roof’s first court appearance, when several family members of victims stepped forward showing compassion.

“He’s evil,” Sanders said. “There’s no place on earth for him except the pit of hell.”

This article originally appeared in Religion News Service. Tonya Maxwell writes for the Asheville (N.C.) Citizen-Times.