8 dead in Mississippi shooting

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last updated 30 May 2017

A man named Willie Cory Godbolt confessed Sunday to fatally shooting eight people in three homes in the towns of Brookhaven and Bogue Chitto, Mississippi. Among the dead was a sheriff's deputy called to investigate after a neighbor reported a disturbance. The identities of the victims have not been released.

"I ain't fit to live, not after what I done," Godbolt confessed to a local paper after he was arrested. "Not in y'all eyes, not in nobody else's eyes." Godbolt said he did not intend to hurt the deputy — "My pain wasn't designed for him. He was just there" — but planned to provoke police into killing him: "Suicide by cop was my intention."

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Bonnie Kristian was a deputy editor and acting editor-in-chief of TheWeek.com. She is a columnist at Christianity Today and author of Untrustworthy: The Knowledge Crisis Breaking Our Brains, Polluting Our Politics, and Corrupting Christian Community (forthcoming 2022) and A Flexible Faith: Rethinking What It Means to Follow Jesus Today (2018). Her writing has also appeared at Time Magazine, CNN, USA Today, Newsweek, the Los Angeles Times, and The American Conservative, among other outlets.

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