Notes to Dylann’s parents in the same placement that he left them, in the backseat of his car
Photos of the notes taken as evidence after being moved
Dylann initially did not expect that he would survive the shooting. Regardless of this, he did not leave anything behind that would be considered a suicide note.
imho, the only things that can be interpreted as some type of “last words” from him are these notes to his mother and father, and the text that was left by him on his website, thelastrhodesian.
An excerpt: “Unfortunately at the time of writing I am in a great hurry and some of my best thoughts, actually many of them have been to be left out and lost forever.”
Dylann brought eight magazines with him. Each filled with exactly 11 hollow-point bullets. This means that he was armed with 88 bullets in total. He shot 77 rounds during the shooting. Saving his last full magazine with the intentions of shooting himself when he was confronted by police.
After shooting 77 rounds, Dylann was shocked when he walked outside of the church and was met with an empty parking lot. No police car in sight, not even a siren.
“To be honest I was in absolute awe that there was nobody out there after I had shot that many bullets I was like oh my God, what are these cops doing?”
“I peeked out the door, cause I thought there was gonna be somebody there ready to shoot me, you know what I’m saying? So you know, that’s really why I had the last magazine- is not to shoot cops- is so I could shoot myself. You see what I’m saying? When I saw a cop- yeah I wasn’t ever gonna shoot at a cop I was gonna shoot myself, but anyway like I said there was no cops so I just got in my car and then uh, I just drove out of Charleston”
Since Dylann anticipated that he would not make it out alive, he had no plan at all. He just got in his car and started driving.
“I just didn’t wanna go back to Columbia and I just, like I said you know, I was still in awe that I even was driving at all, or I even got away.”
Dylann said he was driving around aimlessly, not only on the interstate but on main roads as well. When asked, he said that he was not sure why he decided to go to Charlotte, besides the fact that he saw the name while driving and thought that it was sort of close by. He didn’t want to drive too far because he did not have a lot of gas left, and he didn’t want to use his debit card to pay for more, afraid that law enforcement would use this transaction to track his location. He did eventually end up using his debit card when he decided that he had to get more gas. He withdrew $20 from an ATM and used it to fill up his tank at a gas station in Charlotte. After filling up his tank, Dylann decided that he was going to try to get to Nashville, Tennessee. When asked why he chose Nashville he laughed and replied:
“Why not? No reason, I never been to Nashville, but it’s sort of far away, I don’t know if I’ll have been able to make it.”
The drive from Charlotte to Nashville is almost 7 hours long. It’s clear that Dylann had made no plans to evade capture because he did not believe that he would even make it out of the church parking lot. Only 1 hour outside of Charlotte, in Shelby, North Carolina, Dylann was apprehended by law enforcement. This was his response to being asked what was going through his mind while being pulled over:
“Oh well I knew they were gonna get me eventually anyway, I was just waiting for ‘em.”
He said that at this point he had decided that taking his own life was “a bad idea”
