DEL.ICIO.USNichols’ mother calls him easygoing, ‘a gentleman’
After courthouse shootings, she wrote she wished him dead
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Friday, October 24, 2008
Brian Nichols’ mother took the witness stand Friday to testify on behalf of the son whom she said she once wished had died after he killed four people.
Claritha Nichols described a healthy relationship between her son and a woman whom he was later accused of raping, an act that would later set in motion what became known as the Fulton Courthouse shooting.
Kimberly Smith/ksmith@ajc.com
Claritha Nichols described a healthy relationship between her son and a woman whom he was later accused of raping.
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As the 88th witness testify in the now month-long death-penalty trial, Claritha Nichols told how she had socialized with the girlfriend’s parents, attended weddings and “pig pickings” together and how their children seemed to have a blissful relationship during most of the seven years they were together. She never saw her son argue with or mistreat any woman — much less the woman who would ultimately accuse him of a brutal rape.
“He was always a gentleman,” Claritha Nichols said. “He intended to marry (her) and of course that made me very happy. She was such a fine person and … they were good for each other.”
But the woman testified earlier in the trial that the relationship had deteriorated rapidly in its last year after Brian Nichols had impregnated another woman. A psychologist testified this week the former girlfriend was a controlling woman who objected to Nichols’ friends but apparently was unaware of heavy daily marijuana use.
Friday, after praying in the corridor before entering the Superior Courtroom, the 64-year-old, soft-spoken Claritha Nichols painted a gentler picture of her son who has been portrayed as a monster by prosecutors.
She described an easygoing man who was heavily involved with a small church in Gwinnett County and someone who had quickly advanced from a security-guard job to one as an UNIX system administrator at UPS that paid $80,000 a year once he decided to buckle down.
She said her son and his girlfriend loved the close-knit church and were baptized together. “It was so small that when the pastor asked the choir to sing, half the congregation would get up behind the pastor and sing.”
She testified that she was extremely disappointed when she learned that her son had impregnated another woman and that undermined his relationship with the long-term girlfriend. “I said perhaps (she) was too organized for you and tried to make you more responsible — God knows you needed it,” Claritha Nichols read from an e-mail that she had sent her son.
The Atanta Journal-Constitution is not the naming the long-term girlfriend because the paper has a policy of not naming sexual-assault victims. The woman ended the relationship in July 2004 and she accused Nichols of raping her on Aug. 19, 2005 after taking her captive in her home.
The mother’s testimony came after Mark Cunningham, a psychologist hired by the defense, testified that her son suffers from delusional disorder, a mental illness that allows him to act logically and appear normal but still be so deluded as to believe he was carrying out a “slave rebellion” by killing a judge, a court reporter and two law officers. One of the officers was off duty at a house he was building, and Nichols said he him killed out of self defense.
Nichols confessed to committing the killings on March 11, 2005, after he escaped from custody before his rape trial resumed that morning. He told police he didn’t want to be made into a slave and he viewed the justice system as racially oppressive and prisons as a substitute for slavery.
Claritha Nichols was thousands of miles away from her Jonesboro home, working in Tanzania, when her son killed the judge presiding over his rape trial and the court reporter, using the pistol of a deputy he had overpowered.
After the killings, Claritha Nichols’ shock and anguish came out in an e-mail to a friend at the Fulton County Sheriff’s office who was also a deacon at Shiloh Baptist Church in Jonesboro to which she and her husband Gene belonged.
“Me and Gene are grieving and angry Brian is still alive,” she wrote to the deputy in an e-mail. “If he would’ve killed himself there would be finality. We now have to wait years for (the) judicial system to execute him.”
The Altanta Journal-Constitution obtained the e-mails in 2005 through the state open-records law. Claritha Nichols has said she regretted making the statement about wishing her son dead. The parents released a statement in August 2005 in which they said they still loved their son.
Cunningham, the $250-an-hour psychologist hired by the defense, said Nichols “still has delusional disorder” as the defendant listened impassively to the testimony. Cunningham, a professional witness, is being paid by the state. So far his billed for more than 300 hours would total at least $75,000.
Psychologist says parents have role in Nichols’ problems
Two people who played a role in causing Nichols’ illness are his parents, Cunningham said. He testified the parents both worked long hours when he was growing up; his father running a series of failed businesses, and his mother — who then worked as a regional manager for the Internal Revenue Service — being absent from home for days or weeks at time.
“I had too much responsibility,” Claritha Nichols testified Friday.
Cunningham described her as emotionally absent and disengaged from her two sons when they were growing up in Baltimore. The psychologist seemed particularly shocked that neither parent visited Nichols when he was in the Fulton County jail for seven months before his rape trial. When they returned to the United States from Tanzania, where Claritha was working, for a visit, they did not come to Atlanta.
Nichols confessed to killing Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sheriff’s Deputy Sgt. Hoyt Teasley at the courthouse and David Wilhelm, an off-duty federal agent while on the run.
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