DEL.ICIO.USNichols caused panic when he left courthouse
Deputy pursued defendant through complex, onto street where he died
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Tuesday, September 30, 2008
The events that morning were like sweeping a camera too fast across a landscape. Everything moved too fast. Everything blurred. And on Tuesday, almost three and half years later, witnesses still tried to make sense of it.
Defense lawyer Samia Giddings testified she was readying to cross the street when she heard a door alarm ring and saw a man with a gun burst from an emergency exit of the Fulton County Courthouse and run up steps to Martin Luther King Drive.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Sgt. John Starks covers his face Tuesday while recounting Brian Nichols’ shooting rampage.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Sgt. John Starks (left) shows to prosecutor Clint Rucker the stairwell exit where Sgt. Hoyt Teasley exited the courthouse and was subsequently shot by Brian Nichols.
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“He was firing a gun … it was just random firing, like a warning shot would be, and people were scattering,” Giddings testified in Superior Court at Brian Nichols’ murder trial Tuesday. “My thought was, ‘Somebody doesn’t want to go to jail.’”
A second later, she said, the firing was much more lethal. The door alarm rang again and Giddings saw a sheriff’s deputy run out the same door as the gunman and up the outside stairs in pursuit.
The gunman, who was in the middle of the street, turned and took aim at the deputy and fired twice, Giddings said.
“At this point, I’m trying to scream but nothing came out,” Giddings said. “I’m saying, ‘NO, NO, NO.’”
She said the deputy staggered backwards and then fell.
“He looked surprised like, ‘I’ve been shot,’” Giddings testified. “He didn’t have an opportunity to draw his weapon.”
She said the gunman started up the street and then looked directly at her. “That is when I decided, ‘I got to get out of here.’”
Giddings said she went into the parking deck and hid in her car. Shortly, she said, she fled downtown Atlanta.
She witnessed what prosecutors say was Brian Nichols’ third murder in what has become known as the Fulton County Courthouse shootings. Prosecutors are seeking the death penalty.
Earlier Tuesday, Jarvis Williams, a retired deputy sergeant, testified he knew something was wrong on March 11, 2005 when he heard an odd radio call as he was arriving for work.
The caller used Sgt. Grantley White’s radio number. But the caller lacked White’s distinct accent from the island of Barbados.
White was the bailiff for Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes.
Williams testified he got to court security’s central-control room and asked a deputy why he wasn’t checking on White.
Williams testified nobody told him that someone had pressed a panic button in Barnes’ office at least twice, trying to summon help.
Moments later, Williams heard someone frantically keying a radio and then saying “shots fired in courtroom 8H.”
“It sounded like Sgt. White, ” Williams said of the deputy with a well-known Caribbean-rich baritone. “It wasn’t his normal, deep voice. He was almost screaming.”
Williams and two other deputies then leaped onto the elevator outside the sheriff’s office and quickly dropped to the 8th floor.
“I remember saying to the other two, ‘This is live,’” Williams testified. “When we exit this elevator, we need to … with our weapons raised. Let’s stay together.”
The three men sprinted down the corridor of the Justice Tower toward the bridge that connected the modern court building to the old Fulton Courthouse where Barnes presided in courtroom 8H.
At that moment, Barnes and his court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau, were already dead on the floor and White and two other staffers were handcuffed in Barnes’ chambers.
The three deputies could smell the gunpowder as they reached the bridge. Unknown to them, two other deputies were ahead of them.
Nichols, who then was on trial for rape in Barnes’ court, is accused escaping from a holding cell by brutally beating his guard, taking her pistol and then gunning down Barnes and Brandau in the courtroom after capturing White and the staff.
Nichols is also accused of killing Deputy Hoyt Teasley outside the courthouse and David Wilhelm, an off-duty federal agent, during a robbery while on the run.
Teasley and Sgt. John Starks had been outside the control-room when they responded to a panic-button signal from Barnes’ chambers — which had been pressed at least twice.
They weren’t unduly alarmed — panic buttons were hit accidentally and the sheriff’s office had recently changed its policy to verify the call before responding to every signal.
Teasley trotted toward the elevator to go to the eighth floor. Starks, who had just sat down to eat his breakfast, jumped up and dropped his hat and his food, Starks testified Tuesday.
He stopped to pick up the food and the hat — regulations required that the “Smoky-the-Bear” hat be worn at all times in uniform — and watched the elevator door close behind Teasley - who wasn’t carrying his radio or wearing his bulletproof vest.
When Starks exited the elevator on the 8th floor, he said he heard another radio transmission: “A judge has been shot in 8H.”
The deputy dropped his breakfast and took off running. When he entered the court, he found two bodies and a screaming law clerk who was too hysterical to tell him what happened, Starks said.
Starks left the courtroom and ran down a staircase to the Pryor Street public entrance. When he burst into the courthouse lobby, he was faced with deputies with drawn guns, aiming at him.
Teasley had gone down a fire-escape staircase that led to Martin Luther King Drive, apparently in pursuit of Nichols, Starks said.
Teasley, who didn’t have his radio, wouldn’t have known about the killings, Starks said.
On the street outside, prosecutors say, Nichols fired into the air to create pandemonium in the crowd and then shot Teasley when he came through the exit.
Then, Nichols escaped.
On the street outside, prosecutors say, Nichols fired into the air to create pandemonium in the crowd and then ambushed Teasley when he came through the exit, shooting him in the abdomen.
Then, Nichols escaped.
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