Pizza Shop Gunman Says He Regrets How He Handled Situation

By JONATHAN DREW and TOM FOREMAN Jr., Associated Press SALISBURY, N.C. (AP) — The man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant said he regrets how he handled the situation but refused to completely dismiss the false online claims involving a child sex ring that brought him there. “I just wanted to do some good and went about it the wrong way,” Edgar Maddison Welch, who’s been jailed since his Sunday arrest, told The New York Times in a Wednesday videoconference. Welch, 28, told the newspaper he started driving to Washington from his Salisbury, North Carolina, home intending only to give the Comet Ping Pong pizza restaurant a “closer look.” But while on the way, he said he felt his “heart breaking over the thought of innocent people suffering.” Related ArticlesDecember 6, 2016 Pizzagate: From rumor, to hashtag, to gunfire in D.C. December 6, 2016 Milbank: In Trump’s America, “pizzagate” could be the new normal December 5, 2016 Pizzagate and the real cost of fake news, plus a quick way to catch up on the weekend Welch would not say why he brought an AR-15 into the pizza shop and fired it, the newspaper reported. Asked what he thought when he found there were no children in the restaurant, Welch said: “The intel on this wasn’t 100 percent.” But he would not completely dismiss the online claims while talking to the newspaper, conceding only that there were no children “inside that dwelling.” Welch appears to have lived an aimless life that became turbulent in the weeks before he was drawn to the nation’s capital by a fake news story. Friends and family say he is a well-meaning father of two girls who wanted to be a firefighter.