Two women involved in Thursday’s DeKalb County Courthouse brawl say DeKalb sheriff’s deputies mishandled the incident and should have had better security.
“I was afraid for my life,” said Marshae Hicks, who was in the courthouse for a pretrial hearing for her juvenile son, a co-defendant in the trial for the murder of Southwest DeKalb High School senior Marcus Holloway.
Tasha Morgan was there with her sons to give Hicks a ride, and said the deputies arriving on the scene used stun guns to break up the fracas.
The women said people related to Holloway attacked them.
“One big man came up to me and started hitting me,” Morgan said by phone Friday afternoon. “It’s a high-profile case. There should’ve been security on that floor to protect people.”
The DeKalb County Sheriff’s Office provides security for the courthouse. A sheriff's spokesman denied stun guns were used on those involved in the fight.
“No one was Tasered,” Sgt. Adrion Bell told The Atlanta Journal-Constitution on Friday.
Sheriff Thomas Brown told the AJC on Thursday that deputies "were there in 90 seconds or less, and they came with sufficient [numbers] to stop the incident with minimum force."
The sheriff credited his deputies for conducting tight security that preemptively prevented worse violence. “They do a good job of keeping weapons from getting into the building,” Brown said.
Morgan and Hicks dispute Brown’s assertion, however, saying deputies weren’t responsive enough.
“Even if it took 90 seconds, where were the bailiffs that should’ve been there from the start?” Morgan asked.
“That was too many people for us to have to protect ourselves,” said Hicks who described the altercation as being 25 against five, including Morgan’s adult son who suffers from scoliosis as the result of a congenital condition he was born with. “I’m really afraid to go back to the courthouse.”
Sheriff’s officials arrested four adults and two juveniles following the melee that started around 10 a.m., outside a sixth-floor courtroom. Authorities described a “mob” of 20 people involved in the fight that began with a verbal altercation that escalated into punches flying.
Among those arrested were Demetrius Dontavious Armberster, 17, LaQuinton Forte, 18, and Hydrick B. Tiller, 46, each of whom remain in jail on $500 bond.
Hicks’ older son, Sanchez Marquitte Hicks, 20, was also arrested, and released late Thursday night on $100 bond. Each of the men was charged with creating a fray, a misdemeanor.
Hicks’ younger son -- whose name is not being published because he is a minor -- was in court as part of the trial that involved him and four men accused of killing Holloway in a drive-by shooting in January 2011.
Antoine Willis, Jr., 20, Kyree Oshay Brantley, 19, Jaquanta Grimes, 20, Timothy Slaton, 19, and Brandon Matthew Reed, 28 – all said by authorities to be members of the so-called “Hoe Haters” gang – are each charged with felony murder in the case and remain in the DeKalb County jail awaiting trial.
Brown said that someone should have walked away and called for the authorities when the shouting began.
But Morgan said when they were confronted, the only thing they could do was call out for help and try to defend themselves.
“Before any blows took place, we were screaming for police,” she said. “How do you walk away if you’re being pounded on? Either you defend yourself or you get killed.”
Bell said there were deputies in assigned to other courtrooms on the sixth floor, and the responded immediately to the report of the fight in the waiting area just outside.
“For them to take 2 or 3 minutes to come out of the courtrooms, that is unreasonable,” he said. “If she’s being mobbed, she may not have seen them immediately. But I assure you, they were there.”
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