Nichols’ mother paints positive image

Brian Nichols’ mother described her son as a “gentleman” Friday, testifying that she never saw him argue with or mistreat any woman —-much less the girlfriend who accused him of 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.”

Claritha Nichols, 64, took the witness stand to testify on behalf of the son she once said she wished had died after the Fulton County Courthouse shootings on March 11, 2005. Before entering the courtroom, she and a friend prayed in the corridor .

Speaking softly on the stand, she described a healthy relationship between her son and his longtime girlfriend and 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.

But the former girlfriend testified earlier that the relationship deteriorated rapidly in its last year after Brian Nichols had impregnated another woman.

A defense psychologist told the jury this week that the former girlfriend was a controlling woman who objected to Nichols’ friends and apparently was unaware of his heavy daily marijuana use.

Claritha Nichols painted a gentler picture of her son.

She described a 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.

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution is not 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. She accused Nichols of raping her on Aug. 19, 2004 in her home.

The mother testified after Mark Cunningham, a psychologist hired by the defense.

Cunningham 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.

Nichols confessed to the killings that March 11, before his rape trial resumed that morning. He told police later that he didn’t want to be enslaved and that 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, the day of the killings.

Afterward, 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, where she and her husband Gene attended.

“Me and Gene are grieving and angry Brian is still alive,” she wrote to the deputy in the 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 AJC obtained the e-mails in 2005 through the state open-records law. Claritha Nichols has said she regrets saying she wished her son dead. The parents said in an August 2005 interview that they still loved their son.

Cunningham, the $250-an-hour psychologist hired by the defense, said the confessed killer “still has delusional disorder.” He is being paid by the state. So far his bill for more than 300 hours would total at least $75,000.

Two people who played a role in causing Nichols’ illness are his parents, Cunningham said. He said Claritha and Gene Nichols both worked long hours in Baltimore when their son was growing up; his father ran a series of failed businesses, and his mother, then a regional manager for the Internal Revenue Service, was 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.

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.

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.