Suspect’s Childhood Neighbors Baffled by Slayings in Atlanta

In the tight group of guys who grew up together on Windemere Avenue in Baltimore, Brian Gene Nichols was always the joker.

“Definitely the joker,” said Charles Franklin Jr., one of Nichols’ closest childhood friends.

But there was another side to the 33-year-old man accused of carrying out a deadly, two-day shooting spree in Atlanta.

“It was like ‘nobody messes with him,’ ” Franklin recalled Saturday. “Don’t get me wrong. He wasn’t a bully. But he lifted weights, and he was a pretty big guy. He had a background in the martial arts, and that, combined with his size, made people leave him alone. He never had to show any aggression.”

Franklin said he was stunned when his friend’s face flashed across a television screen after the shootings in the Atlanta area. He could not imagine the Brian Nichols he grew up with taking the lives of a judge, a court reporter, one deputy police officer and a U.S. Immigration and Customs agent and committing a string of other violent crimes.

What made no sense to Franklin, a Baptist minister, was how Nichols had veered away from the solid, stable upbringing they shared in the Ednor Gardens section of Baltimore.

“Our parents pretty much raised us to respect others, to excel and to achieve in life,” said Franklin, who grew up 10 houses away from Nichols in a middle-class neighborhood where kids played together, laughed and crashed on each other’s sofas.

The two were in the popular clique at Cardinal Gibbons High School, Franklin said. Both played varsity football -- Franklin as a wide receiver and Nichols as a lineman. They acted up, Franklin said, but came home to parents who imbued them with strong values and high aspirations.

“We could talk to any parent,” Franklin said. “Their doors were always open. They told us the sky was the limit, that we could do anything we set out to do. All of us had those things instilled in us, to be achievers, to be successful. And we were all driven to those purposes.

“So what we don’t understand is at what point did whatever change in his life?” Franklin said. “The whole community, everyone is talking about it. We don’t understand it.”

Nichols’ mother, Clathera, is a retired Internal Revenue Service worker. His father, Gene, was an entrepreneur, friends said. They raised their sons in Maryland, sending them to private schools and to college. Brian Nichols’ brother Mark became a barber in Plantation, Fla.

After high school, Brian Nichols attended Kutztown University in eastern Pennsylvania. He majored in biology and played one season as a linebacker at the Division 2 school, but dropped out in his sophomore year, university officials said.

Nichols was arrested three times in the 1990s in Pennsylvania and pleaded guilty to disorderly conduct and harassment.

In his freshman year at Kutztown, Nichols began dating Stephanie L. Jay. She became pregnant with his daughter, but by the time the child was born, Nichols had left school and the relationship. Their daughter is now 13.

“This is a bad time,” Jay said from her home in Allentown, Pa. “It’s sad for us all, particularly for my daughter. He hasn’t done anything for her. I was at work when I saw it on the news. I knew it was him right away. I couldn’t speak.”

She said he was “always nice to me. He didn’t raise his voice to me.”

Her brother Scott Jay, met Nichols several times. “Back then, he was a nice kid,” said Jay, who lives outside Atlanta in Suwanee, Ga. “He was always smiling and joking around. We got along.”

In Baltimore, his onetime neighbors said they could not connect the boy they knew to the crimes he was accused of committing. When they first heard news reports, they were convinced the police had the wrong person.

“I’m shocked,” said Maxine Glover. “He grew up with my daughter. They played out on the porch and in the backyard. He was a normal child. Quiet and laid-back, not nasty or mean.”

Lawrence Glover remembers Nichols as “real smart in school and he was a piano player.”

The Glovers said the whole neighborhood was in a state of disbelief. “No one can believe it. We’re all are saying same thing: Something had to happen to make him do this,” Maxine Glover said. “We cannot understand it. Something drastic had to happen.”

By 1995, Nichols was living in Georgia. He found work as a computer technician with a United Parcel Service subsidiary and lived in the upscale Laurel Grove condominums.

Not everyone there remembers him fondly.

“He grilled out a lot, and we had to talk to him because the air would blow into our apartment,” said Tim Spruell, 40, a criminal defense attorney who lived above Nichols when Nichols first moved to Laurel Grove.

“He wasn’t friendly,” Spruell said. “I found him hard to talk to. He had a big, ugly pit bull, and he could be confrontational.”

Spruell said Nichols’ girlfriend was active in the community and served on the board of the condominium association.

“She was very nice,” he said. “But we knew he wasn’t nice to her. Word got around.”

He said that when police came to arrest Nichols on rape charges, “he punched a hole in the skylight and disappeared.”

Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Mehren from Boston. Material from Associated Press and the Baltimore Sun was used in this report.