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Judge, two others shot dead at courthouse

Massive manhunt rattles Atlanta: A courtroom explodes in violence as a man on trial for rape grabs a gun and goes on a murderous rampage, then flees. There were few leads to his whereabouts.

A huge manhunt swung into motion across the Southeast on Friday as officers searched for a rape suspect accused of overpowering a sheriff's deputy in an Atlanta courthouse and then using her gun to kill a judge, a court stenographer and a second sheriff's deputy who had chased the alleged assailant into the street.

The paralyzing shock of the triple slaying, which shut down a chunk of Atlanta's downtown a block from the golden dome of the state Capitol, gave way to revelations of hints the suspect may have given about violent intentions. Two days before the shootings, deputies escorting the suspect, Brian Nichols, 33, from the courthouse to his jail cell noticed something in his shoes. They found two sharp "shanks," common jailhouse weapons probably fashioned out of whittled doorknobs.

The day before the killings, one of the men Nichols is accused of murdering - Judge Rowland Barnes, 64 - had asked for extra security during Nichols's scheduled testimony Friday.

The killings, coming just 11 days after a Chicago federal judge's husband and mother were slain in their home, set off a fresh round of worries about the safety of judges, prosecutors and others involved in the criminal justice system. An average of 700 threats against judicial officials are logged each day, the U.S. Marshals Service reported.

A federal appeals court judge, Robert Vance, was killed by a pipe bomb at his Birmingham home in 1989, and the year before another federal judge, Richard Daronco, was shot in his back yard in New York by the father of a plaintiff in a dismissed sexual discrimination case.

In the Pinellas County criminal courthouse, bailiffs are armed, though their weapons are well-concealed by the suit coats they wear.

Deputies who deal with defendants in secured places, such as a holding cell, are not armed, however, said Capt. Cliff Voege, division commander of court security for the Pinellas County Sheriff's Office.

Police officers or other deputies who enter the courthouse for proceedings or trials must give up their weapons, which are secured in a safe place. Exceptions can be made if permission is sought in advance, Voege said.

Though the agency's policies have been in place for years, Voege said judicial and sheriff's officials review their guidelines after cases of courthouse violence such as the one in Atlanta Friday.

"We do review after all situations like this," Voege said. "It's just a terrible tragedy. We don't wish to repeat it."

Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard, whose office was prosecuting Nichols, said threats the suspect made before the shootings were part of the routine drumbeat of jailhouse chatter.

Nichols had told people in the courthouse "I'm not going to go lying down" when he learned that he would be retried after an earlier mistrial on charges of breaking into his former girlfriend's home, holding her at gunpoint, binding her with duct tape and raping her.

Nichols's courtroom demeanor was perpetually "cocky," Assistant District Attorney Gayle Abramson said. He taunted her during the retrial this week by saying "you're doing a better job this time" and asked for cigarettes and food during court. Abramson said Nichols was surely aware that his case was going poorly. He faced life in prison if convicted.

On Friday morning, Nichols - who is 6 feet tall and weighs 200 pounds - was being escorted from an eighth-floor holding cell to Barnes's courtroom when he attacked Cynthia Hall, the 16-year veteran sheriff's deputy assigned to escort him, investigators said. He was not handcuffed and was wearing regular clothes rather than a prisoner's uniform so as not to influence jurors. Nichols allegedly grabbed her gun, shot her in the head and took her keys so he could escape from the locked holding zone.

She is hospitalized in critical condition but is expected to survive. Nichols then allegedly stalked into Barnes's courtroom, where the judge was hearing arguments in a civil case. He knew the judge well. Barnes had presided over his first trial and was also presiding over the retrial. Barnes had been on the bench since 1998, a well-liked jurist, whose best-known case had been the fatal 2003 car wreck involving hockey star Dany Heatley that killed his teammate Dan Snyder, 25.

He recently made a folksy submission to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, praising one of his court reporters, Julie Brandau, who regularly made peach bread and other treats for jurors and whose "cheerful personality overflows into the ingredients."

"The staff and I are sometimes jealous of her attentions to the jury, and lament the usual lack of leftovers," he wrote.

When Nichols made it into the courtroom, sheriff's deputies said, he held about a dozen people at gunpoint before shooting Barnes and Brandau, 43. Nichols then managed to descend eight floors and slip out of the courthouse. In front of the courthouse, he was chased by Hoyt Teasley, a 19-year veteran sheriff's deputy. Nichols allegedly shot Teasley, who died from a single wound in his abdomen, and fled.

The courthouse was locked down. Lawyers were rushed into secure offices, jurors were told to take cover. Nichols allegedly carjacked at least one vehicle before pulling into a garage in downtown Atlanta. He parked in a handicapped spot adjacent to a space where newspaper reporter Don O'Briant was parking his 1997 green Honda Accord. Investigators say Nichols encountered O'Briant, a Journal-Constitution feature writer on his way to work, pistol-whipped him and stole the Accord.

Then he disappeared.

O'Briant wrote soon afterward that Nichols first asked for directions. "Then he pulled a gun and said: "Give me your keys or I'll kill you!' "

O'Briant, 62, complied, but balked when Nichols ordered him to get into the trunk. When he turned to run, Nichols hit him in the head with the gun, O'Briant wrote. He fell, ran further and fell again when he ran into a garbage bin. O'Briant got up again and soon ran into a colleague, reporter Drew Jubera.

Jubera took O'Briant to a nearby garage, where another Journal-Constitution reporter had witnessed an earlier carjacking, also apparently by Nichols. O'Briant was taken to a hospital, where he filed his story from the emergency room.

Police said Nichols was believed to be driving O'Briant's Honda.

Craig Schwall, a state court judge, said his courtroom deputies think Nichols may have two guns and two magazines of ammunition. Several houses were searched, raising hopes Nichols may have been found, but he remained at large late Friday.

Times staff writer Chris Tisch contributed to this report, which includes information from the Los Angeles Times.

[Last modified March 12, 2005, 00:50:11]