Jurors find US church gunman guilty on all counts

By Michael Hernandez

WASHINGTON

A federal jury on Thursday found the gunman who slaughtered nine black parishioners at a historic South Carolina church guilty of all 33 charges against him.

Self-described white supremacist, Dylann Roof entered the Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in Charleston on July 17, 2015, and sat with his future victims before opening fire during a Bible study.

He made the fatal decision as the congregants closed their eyes for a concluding prayer, firing his Glock .45 until it ran out of bullets. He then reloaded the hollow-point ammunition and repeated the process until his victims were struck at least 60 times.

In all, Roof fired off 77 bullets in the church.

Three women were the sole survivors of the tragedy. One survivor, Felicia Sanders, testified that Roof told her he was going to leave her alive "to tell the story".

Roof's conviction was all but certain heading into the trial as the gunman confessed to federal authorities that he was responsible for the massacre.

Roof outlined his worldview in a journal entered as evidence in the trial. In it he calls blacks "the biggest problem for Americans", and says he would "love for their (sic) to be a race war" in the country.

Instead of the war he actively sought to provoke, the tragedy had the unintended consequence of removing the Confederate flag from the South Carolina courthouse grounds where it had flown for more than 50 years despite opposition from critics who view it as a racist relic.

Roof's defense lawyers did not try to make a case that he did not carry out the crimes, instead asking jurors to question his mental state as a mitigating factor, in an attempt to possibly spare their client a death sentence.

It took the jury only a matter of hours to convict Roof, who represented himself at trial after the judge approved his request.

The same jurors who convicted the gunman will reconvene next month to determine whether Roof will face life imprisonment or the death penalty.