Atlanta Judge, 2 Others Killed in Rampage and Wild Escape

A rape defendant on Friday overpowered a sheriff’s deputy, took her gun and burst into a courtroom where he allegedly killed a judge and a court reporter before fatally shooting another deputy during his escape.

Authorities said Brian Gene Nichols, 33, fled just after 9 a.m. from the eighth floor of the Fulton County Courthouse after killing Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, 64, and Julie Ann Brandau, 43.

Nichols allegedly killed Deputy Hoyt Teasley in front of the courthouse; the female deputy, Cynthia Hall, whose gun was stolen, also was shot but survived.

Authorities embarked on a massive search Friday as schools, restaurants and office buildings around the city went into lockdown.

Immediately after the shootings, judges were locked in their chambers. Officials cordoned off the area around the courthouse, where traumatized, tearful employees stood behind yellow police tape.

On the highways, message boards posted a description of the getaway car. Helicopters buzzed above the city throughout the day.

But as afternoon wore into evening, officials said Nichols could be anywhere.

“We are not going to rest until we have him in custody,” Deputy Police Chief Alan Dreher said. Officials offered a $60,000 reward for information leading to Nichols’ arrest.

Fulton County Dist. Atty. Paul Howard said Nichols might have been upset because his second trial in two weeks on aggravated rape charges was not going well for him.

His first trial ended in a hung jury, and Nichols -- jailed since August -- could have faced life imprisonment.

“He actually said to [the assistant district attorney]: ‘You are doing a better job this time,’ ” Howard said. “He knew he might not walk out.”

Earlier in the week, Nichols was found to be concealing two handmade weapons in his shoes, prompting a request for heightened security.

Nichols had been charged with breaking into his ex-girlfriend’s house and raping and sodomizing her repeatedly over a three-day period. Howard said Nichols brought a cooler full of food and drinks into the woman’s house and told her he would continue to assault her until her birthday.

He did just that, Howard said, adding that Nichols also brought a loaded machine gun into the house. Howard said four of Nichols’ friends turned him into the police.

Friday’s attack was the second high-profile case of violence involving a judge in recent weeks. On Feb. 28, the husband and mother of U.S. District Court Judge Joan Humphrey Lefkow were killed at their home in Chicago.

Colleagues said Barnes was one of the most popular figures in the Atlanta judicial system.

“He was enjoyed by all who knew him, respected and loved -- yes, you can definitely say that,” attorney David Wolfe said. “Anyone who ever came in contact long enough to know him personally felt the same way. Take out the Atlanta phone book and call every lawyer, they will say the same thing.”

The 200-pound, 6-foot-1 Nichols was in a holding area of the courthouse early Friday, changing from his jail-issue overalls into the civilian attire he would wear to the trial. Before Hall -- the only officer guarding Nichols at that time -- could reattach his handcuffs, Nichols allegedly grabbed her gun. He shot her in the head and took her keys so he could escape from the locked holding zone, authorities said.

Hall was taken to a hospital, where she was said to be sedated and unable to discuss the incident.

Authorities said that Nichols left the holding area, in a new tower of the courthouse, crossed a catwalk and went into the older tower that housed Barnes’ courtroom. A civil trial was in progress, with “over a dozen people” present, Dreher said.

Barnes was shot in the head. He and Brandau died in the courtroom.

Nichols then allegedly bolted out of the courtroom and ran down seven flights of stairs.

Selina Brown was at the courthouse with her lawyer when the fugitive “flew by” her.

“He was really moving,” Brown, 36, said. “They could have caught him. They should have caught him.”

Nichols set off an alarm when he left the courthouse through an emergency exit onto Martin Luther King Jr. Boulevard, officials said. Teasley ran after him. Nichols turned on the sidewalk and fired six shots, mortally wounding the deputy.

Rene Rockwell, a lawyer, was in an elevator that stopped on the eighth floor of the courthouse Friday morning. As the doors opened, she saw a deputy’s hat on the floor and uniformed officers racing around.

She called out jokingly: “Did someone escape?” She was pulled back into the elevator by another officer. When the elevator reached the ground floor, she left the building and saw Teasley on the sidewalk.

“I’m surprised [something like this] didn’t happen earlier,” Rockwell said. “You have guys here going down hard, going down for life.”

Nichols allegedly carjacked several vehicles, which may have included a tow truck and an SUV, before pulling into a parking garage in downtown Atlanta. Police said he parked in a handicapped spot adjacent to a space where newspaper reporter Don O’Briant was parking his 1997 green Honda Accord.

“He was a young, athletic-looking black man, and he didn’t have a shirt on,” O’Briant, a feature writer for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, wrote soon afterward.

O’Briant said 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. O’Briant fell, ran farther, fell again and then ran into a garbage bin. O’Briant got up again and saw a colleague, reporter Drew Jubera.

Jubera took O’Briant to a nearby parking garage, where another Journal-Constitution employee 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 that Nichols had escaped in O’Briant’s Honda, which was found late Friday night in a downtown Atlanta parking lot.

Helicopters hovered late Friday above Nichols’ apartment building in the Sandy Springs community. One resident, who wouldn’t give her name, said she drove around and around the gated community of Frank Lloyd Wright-inspired buildings overlooking the freeway, afraid to enter her home. She said Nichols had broken into her condominium last year when the police sent in a SWAT team to arrest him.

Meg Armistead -- a court reporter and secretary of the Laurel Grove condominium association where Nichols lived -- said she heard about the shooting while on her way to a deposition job; the case was scheduled to be heard before Barnes in May. She did not realize her neighbor was the suspect until the end of the day.

“I could not believe it,” she said. “He was a nuisance renter, but I never thought he’d kill a judge, a court reporter and a deputy.”

Armistead, 46, called Nichols “one of the rule breakers” and said that residents had wondered if he had been dealing drugs. “He’d make calls from the pool area at all hours of the day and night,” she said.

Greg Stalnaker, 41, a structural ironworker who lived below Nichols’ apartment, said they rarely crossed paths.

“He seemed shady ... like a wannabe gangster,” he said. “He walked around with no T-shirt, and didn’t come off as a 9-to-5 guy. Some of the women liked him, but I didn’t trust him at all.”

Prosecutors and Barnes asked for extra security in the courtroom Thursday after Nichols was found with the weapons in his shoes. Assistant Dist. Atty. Gayle Abramson said Nichols had sharpened part of a doorknob into a knifelike device.

Abramson also said Nichols behaved in an “inappropriate and sarcastic kind of way” in the courtroom, asking for food and cigarettes and commenting on her progress in the trial.

Although “he always came across as very cocky,” Abramson said, she saw “no evidence of any violence” before Friday.

“I really believe that this was a random situation,” she said. “This is not a defendant who has demonstrated violence in the past. The violence in his past was specific to his victim.”

Of Friday’s killings, she said: “I think in his mind he knew that he was going to be convicted this time, and he was seeking revenge against the criminal justice system in general.”

Nichols’ attorney in the rape trial, Barry Hazen, said that after the weapons were discovered in his client’s shoes, there were concerns about “what reaction we would get if the jury were to convict him.”

Atlanta criminal defense lawyer Dennis Scheib, a former police officer, said he had worried about insufficient security in the county courthouse.

“This could have been prevented,” he said. “I have been yelling ‘security, security’ for years, and everybody put it on the back shelf. Today it cost people their lives.”

Dahlburg and Jarvie reported from Atlanta and Mehren from Boston.