‘You’ve got to be quiet,’ widow Jennifer Pinckney told her 6-year-old

As a hail of bullets was inflicted on nine of her fellow churchgoers in a nearby room, Jennifer Pinckney and her daughter hid underneath a desk covering each other’s mouths.

Pinckney recalled the night of June 17, 2015, when her husband and eight of his parishioners were killed by avowed white supremacist Dylann Roof. She was the first prosecution witness Wednesday during the start of the sentencing phase of Roof’s death penalty trial.

Pinckney said that on the night of the slayings, she had been working on a computer in Emanuel AME Church’s pastor’s office, while her husband, Rev. Clementa Pinckney and eight others, participated in a Bible study in another room. Her youngest daughter, who was 6 years old at the time, watched cartoons on TV in the office. Their eldest was home with her grandmother.

But then, Pinckney testified she heard a “pop, pop, pop.” She and her daughter retreated to an inner office where Pinckney locked the door as they hid underneath a desk.

She told her daughter to be quiet. “I just got real firm with her,” the soon-to-be widow said. “She had never heard me be that mean and be that forceful. ‘Shut up. You’ve got to be quiet.’ ”

Bullets pierced the walls of the office, Pinckney said. She kept shushing her daughter.

“I put my hand over her mouth, just because I didn’t want her to say anything,” Pinckney said. “And then, the next thing I know, she put her hand over my mouth.”

The 911 call Pinckney made also was played in court. Her daughter can be heard in the background asking Pinckney if “daddy’s dead?”

Having to tell her daughters, now 7 and 12, was difficult, the widow said.

“I just said that he will always be with us,” she testified. “It was the hardest thing that I think I have ever had to do.”

This story was originally published January 4, 2017 at 6:43 PM with the headline "‘You’ve got to be quiet,’ widow Jennifer Pinckney told her 6-year-old."