ATLANTA, March 11 -- A huge manhunt swung into motion across the Southeast on Friday as officers searched for a rape suspect who authorities say overpowered a sheriff's deputy in an Atlanta courthouse and then used her gun to kill a judge, a court stenographer and a second sheriff's deputy who had chased the alleged assailant into the street.
The paralyzing shock of the triple slaying, which shut down a chunk of Atlanta's downtown a block from the golden dome of the state Capitol, gave way to revelations of hints the suspect may have given about violent intentions. Two days before the shootings, deputies escorting the suspect, Brian Nichols, 33, from the courthouse to his jail cell noticed something in his shoes. They found two sharp "shanks," common jailhouse weapons probably fashioned out of whittled doorknobs. The day before the killings, one of the men Nichols is accused of murdering -- Judge Rowland Barnes, 64 -- had asked for extra security during Nichols's scheduled testimony Friday.
Law enforcement officers hug at the Fulton County Courthouse after a judge, a court recorder and a deputy were fatally shot there.
(John Bazemore -- AP)
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The killings, coming just 11 days after a Chicago federal judge's husband and mother were slain in their home, set off a fresh round of worries about the safety of judges, prosecutors and others involved in the criminal justice system. An average of 700 threats against judicial officials are logged each day, the U.S. Marshals Service reported. A federal appeals court judge, Robert S. Vance, was killed by a pipe bomb at his Birmingham home in 1989, and the year before another federal judge, Richard J. Daronco, was shot in his back yard in New York by the father of a plaintiff in a dismissed sexual discrimination case.
Fulton County District Attorney Paul S. Howard, whose office was prosecuting Nichols, said threats the suspect made before the shootings were part of the routine drumbeat of jailhouse chatter.
Nichols had told people in the courthouse "I'm not going to go lying down" when he learned that he would be retried after an earlier mistrial on charges of breaking into his former girlfriend's home, holding her at gunpoint, binding her with duct tape and raping her. Nichols's courtroom demeanor was perpetually "cocky," Assistant District Attorney Gayle Abramson said. He taunted her during the retrial this week by saying "you're doing a better job this time" and asked for cigarettes and food during the court session. Abramson said Nichols was surely aware that his case was going poorly. He would face life in prison if convicted.
Brian Nichols, in a photo released by law enforcement officials, is suspected by police of shooting several people in Atlanta early Friday. (AP)
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On Friday morning, Nichols -- who is 6 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds -- was being escorted from an eighth-floor holding cell to Barnes's courtroom when he attacked Cynthia Hall, the 16-year veteran sheriff's deputy assigned to escort him, investigators said. He was not handcuffed and was wearing regular clothes rather than a prisoner's uniform so as not to influence jurors. Nichols snatched Hall's gun and assaulted her.
She is hospitalized in critical condition with a head injury but is expected to survive. Nichols then allegedly stalked into Barnes's courtroom, where the judge was hearing arguments in a civil case. He knew the judge well. Barnes had presided over his first trial and was also presiding over the retrial. Barnes had been on the bench since 1998, a well-liked jurist, whose best-known case had been the fatal 2003 car wreck involving hockey star Dany Heatley that killed his teammate Dan Snyder, 25. He recently made a folksy submission to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, praising one of his court reporters, Julie Brandau, who regularly made peach bread and other treats for jurors and whose "bright and cheerful personality overflows into the ingredients."
"The staff and I are sometimes jealous of her attentions to the jury, and lament the usual lack of leftovers. We wish she would feed us half as well as she does the jury members," he wrote.
When Nichols made it into the courtroom, sheriff's deputies said, he held about a dozen people at gunpoint before shooting Barnes and Brandau, 43. Nichols then managed to descend eight floors and slip out of the courthouse. In front of the courthouse, he was chased by Hoyt Teasley, a 19-year veteran sheriff's deputy. Nichols allegedly shot Teasley, who died from a single wound in his abdomen, and fled.
The courthouse was locked down. Lawyers were rushed into secure offices, jurors were told to take cover. Investigators say Nichols encountered Don O'Briant, a Journal-Constitution feature writer on his way to work, pistol-whipped him and stole his Honda Accord.
Then he disappeared. The car was found in a parking lot hours later, police said.
Outside the courthouse -- across the street from an Atlanta archetype, the Coca-Cola museum -- clerks and stenographers cried and hugged, mourning old friends.
Police and sheriff's deputies, working with federal and state law enforcement officers, launched helicopters for the search, prowled the highways and alerted authorities in neighboring states. Craig Schwall, a state court judge, said his courtroom deputies think Nichols may have two guns and two magazines of ammunition. Several houses were searched, raising hopes that Nichols may have been found, but he remained at large late Friday.
John Matteson, a lawyer who was on a lower floor when the shooting occurred, said an attack was bound to happen because of a shortage of courtroom deputies.
"They just don't have the manpower to deal with it," Matteson said. "They're good folks, but they're pushed to the limit."
As the late-afternoon sun cast a reflection of the Capitol dome on the glass-paneled courthouse, stern-faced bodyguards brusquely took prosecutor Abramson by the arm and escorted her away from the news-media throng to a safe place.
Lasoff Levs is a special correspondent. Researcher Meg Smith contributed to this report.
