Pizza shop gunman says he regrets how he handled situation

SALISBURY, N.C. -- The man accused of firing an assault rifle inside a Washington restaurant said he regrets how he handled the situation but wouldn't completely dismiss 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 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."

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. But he also unnerved some with his religious fervor and sometimes had trouble detaching himself from the internet.

In the weeks before his Washington arrest, there were other signs of turbulence. In late October, Welch struck a teenage pedestrian with his car in his hometown, requiring the boy to be airlifted to a hospital, according to a police report that said he wasn't immediately charged.