Each morning they flow into Courtroom Six, escorted by federal officials from a holding room reserved for survivors and families of the victims. The accused, Dylann S. Roof, never turns from the end of the defense table to acknowledge the parents, widows and widowers, children, grandchildren and fellow congregants of the nine African-Americans he has confessed to killing in June 2015 at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church.
Felicia Sanders, who survived the rampage but lost her son and her aunt, watches and listens the first of six rows of wooden benches, along with her husband, Tyrone. The Rev. Eric S. C. Manning, who now inhabits the office once occupied by the church’s pastor, the Rev. Clementa C. Pinckney, who was among those killed, sits one row back. The Rev. Anthony B. Thompson, whose wife, Myra, led the evening Bible study that Mr. Roof joined, takes his place in the fifth row, along with John Pinckney, the former pastor’s father.
Until the prosecution and the defense rested on Wednesday, family members stoically endured six days of tormenting testimony in United States District Court, where Mr. Roof, 22, faces 33 counts and a possible capital sentence. On Tuesday, for instance, they watched three unnerving videos that Mr. Roof filmed of himself taking backyard target practice with the murder weapon in a two-handed grip. On Wednesday, they heard from a medical examiner about the more than 60 wounds inflicted by his Winchester hollow-point bullets.
Here is what it has been like for some in the courtroom:
Mr. Thompson has attended Mr. Roof’s trial each day except last Thursday, when he knew prosecutors would show photographs of the blood bath inside the fellowship hall.
“I didn’t want to see the images,” he said in his office at Holy Trinity Reformed Episcopal Church, where he is vicar. “I didn’t want to have that in my head every day for the rest of my life, and of course I didn’t want to see my wife like that.”
His decision meant he also missed the videos, captured by a church security camera, of some of the final moments of his 59-year-old wife’s life: the six-second clip of her striding purposefully in the side door at 5 p.m., dressed in a black suit and white blouse; then the footage of her slipping out an hour later, warmly hugging two church members. Two hours after that, the camera captured Mr. Roof entering, a black pack around his waist, weighted by a .45-caliber Glock and eight loaded magazines.
“It has been an emotional roller coaster,” Mr. Thompson said. “We have shed tears. There has been fear of the unknown.”
Mr. Thompson, 64, was one of the five family members who, in a spontaneous demonstration of grace, expressed forgiveness for Mr. Roof at his bond hearing less than 48 hours after the shootings. That has not changed, he said, despite watching Mr. Roof’s nonchalant and largely remorseless admission to plotting the assault to foment racial strife.
“I have no intentions of taking that back,” the gray-headed clergyman said, stressing that his forgiveness had been more for himself than for Mr. Roof. “He is not a part of my life anymore. Forgiveness has freed me of that, of him completely. I’m not going to make him a lifetime partner.”
That said, he wished the Justice Department had accepted Mr. Roof’s offer to plead guilty in exchange for a life sentence. “The bad part is having to relive it, the going back to the beginning,” he said. “It’s just a lot to bear.”
Mr. Thompson said he finds Mr. Roof a pathetic figure but not mentally defective, as Mr. Roof’s lawyers would like the jury to believe. As a result, although he opposes the death penalty, he does not much care what happens to Mr. Roof.
“His sentence won’t affect the way I live, won’t bring my wife back,” he said. “Whatever he gets I look at it as, well, that’s what he’s supposed to get. I have no choice in the matter.”
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