DEL.ICIO.USUpdated: 6:37 p.m. October 01, 2008
Nichols was calm, armed and scary, carjack victims say
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Wednesday, October 01, 2008
Five carjacking victims testified Wednesday how Brian Nichols skipped from parking deck to parking deck, taking vehicles at gunpoint, staying one step ahead of the police as he fled the March 2005 courthouse shootings.
They described Nichols as calm, commanding and, most of all scary.
John Spink/jspink@ajc.com
Tow truck driver Deronta Franklin demonstrates how he surrendered his truck to Brian Nichols.
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Almeta Kilgo, a software designer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, said she had just pulled into a parking spot in a garage on Cone Street when she saw a tow truck behind her and a man approaching, toting two pistols.
At first she thought the nicely dressed man might be a police officer — until he put a pistol to her head and told her in a calm, authoritative voice to move over to the passenger seat. Instead, Kilgo sat frozen.
“He said, ‘I’m not playing with you. Can’t you see the blood on my hands,’” Kilgo testified.
As they drove off, Nichols had trouble finding the exit and Kilgo said he apparently became concerned with her whimpering in the front seat. He stopped the car and pushed a button to pop the trunk and ordered to get into it.
Kilgo didn’t freeze this time. She fled. “I immediately started screaming — very loudly,” she said. “I tripped and fell and when I turned to get up he was standing right over me and had the gun pointing down toward my face. He kept telling me to shut up.
“I could see into the barrel of the gun.”
Instead, Kilgo kept screaming. Nichols, instead of firing, turned and fled.
“When I was lying on my back, I was really trying to do the scream so when he pulled the trigger I wouldn’t notice.”
She wasn’t the only person to mistake Nichols for a law officer. The first carjacking victim of the crime spree, E. Duane Cooper, a deputy solicitor for the county, said he wasn’t alarmed at all when he saw Nichols stroll into a parking garage across from the Fulton County Courthouse, cradling a pistol against his chest.
At the time, Cooper didn’t know the man dressed in “business casual” attire was suspected of killing Sheriff’s Deputy Hoyt Teasley on Martin Luther King Drive outside the parking garage seconds before and of killing Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes and court reporter Julie Ann Brandau minutes before.
“He walked up in a very calm, leisurely fashion,” said Cooper. “He didn’t seem nervous. He didn’t seem in a hurry. My first impression was, ‘He must be a police officer.’”
But a moment later, Nichols was besides Cooper’s door, brandishing the pistol and grabbing the driver’s side door handle. ‘You want to know his exact words?” said Cooper. “He said ‘Give it up mother… .”
Cooper got out. Nichols got in.
He put the truck in reverse “just about burning rubber out of the entrance,” said Cooper, recalling at that moment he thought: “This guy can drive a stick.”
Cooper watched as Nichols drove up Martin Luther King Drive towards Peachtree Street, fleeing a crime scene where three were shot dead — Teasley, Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes and his court reporter, Julie Ann Brandau, in Barnes’ courtroom.
Nichols is charged with committing all three killings after he had escaped from custody by beating another deputy so severely that she was brain-damaged. He had pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity.
On Wednesday witnesses testified about the chaos on the street and the furious first few minutes of his getaway, driving in and out of parking decks downtown and hijacking vehicles as he headed north, eluding police as they swarmed south to the courthouse.
Nichols would eventually make his way to Buckhead and, prosecutors say, shoot and kill his fourth victim, U.S. Customs agent David Wilhelm.
The first witness of the day, Jill Polster, recalled being paralyzed with indecision and disbelief as she saw Nichols crossing Martin Luther King, firing into the air, and then firing across the street.
“I stood on the corner not really know what was going on,” she said. “I didn’t feel threatened at that point. I just stood there. I thought he might have been undercover law enforcement responding to something.”
She watched him run into a parking deck, the called 911 at 9:05 a.m. to report she had seen a gunman and heard shots. Nichols had escaped from a holding cell about 8:52 a.m., according to a camera recording. Barnes and Brandau were killed shortly before 9 a.m., witnesses said.
In the courthouse, deputies were scrambling after discovering the bodies of Barnes and Brandau and the badly beaten Deputy Cynthia Hall. The first medical help arrived at about 9:10.
Grady EMS supervisor Astria Benton described the scene as “pandemonium,” as she tried, without success, to revive Teasley. Fellow deputies “were really upset,” she said. “A lot of them were crying. Some of them were screaming.”
At about that moment Larry McCrary, who works for the Fulton County Juvenile Court, was following Nichols as the gunman drove Cooper’s hijacked truck, heading west on Martin Luther King Jr. Drive, turning right and heading north on Peachtree Street.
McCrary testified that he had pulled over by the courthouse to help with Teasley when an unidentified Atlanta police officer spotted Nichols’ truck and told him “to stay behind that vehicle.”
McCrary said he had no radio in his county vehicle. So, when he followed Nichols north on Peachtree and saw Atlanta police cars on the other side of the road, he couldn’t radio them.
Instead he frantically waved out the window, trying to flag police down, but he said they going the other direction. McCrary watched as Nichols pulled into a parking deck beside underground Atlanta.
He testified that he parked his vehicle to block the entrance and exit to the deck, then got out of his vehicle and went outside the deck to try to alert police.
Then he saw Nichols exit the deck and find his next victim — tow truck driver Deronta Franklin, who was parked on the sidewalk at the corner of Peachtree and Wall streets.
Franklin had seen Nichols whip into the parking garage in Cooper’s truck and alerted three police who were passing by, telling them, “He went in there, he went in there,” and pointing at the parking deck.
About the time the cops went in, Nichols came out and walked calmly up to Franklin. He pointed a pistol at the tow truck driver and former bounty hunter who said he recognized the gun as the ones issued Fulton County sheriff’s deputies.
“Get out of the truck,” Nichols told Franklin in a calm voice. The tow truck driver got out of the truck, backed up and raising his hands in surrender. “You can have the truck,” he told Nichols.
Nichols got into the tow truck. He drove north again on Peachtree, looking for the next deck — and, as events would unfold, his next victim.
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