A rape suspect grabbed a policeman’s gun and opened fire in a courtroom in the United States on Friday, killing the judge, a sheriff’s deputy and a court reporter.
Another deputy was wounded as he chased the suspect, Brian Nichols, who ran from the court in Atlanta, Georgia.
He was then reported to have stolen a car and pistol-whipped its owner, a journalist from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. He later hijacked several other cars to try to escape a police hunt.
All the judges in the building were locked in their chambers and local schools were closed as a precaution, as police combed central Atlanta.
Across Georgia, electronic highway messages were posted with information on the vehicle Nichols was believed to have taken.
The murdered judge, Rowland Barnes, had been presiding over Nichols’s second trial on charges of kidnapping and raping a former girlfriend, after the first ended with a hung jury last week.
Judge Barnes had been dealing with issues from another, civil hearing before calling in the new jury.
Nichols, who was not shackled, reportedly took a gun from a deputy’s holster and shot the deputy before opening fire on the judge and the court reporter.
Chuck Cole, a civil defence attorney who was in an adjoining car park when he heard gunfire at about 9:10am, told the Associated Press: ”We heard some noise. It sounded like three or four shots. At the time, we thought it was just an engine backfiring.”
James Bailey, a juror at Nichols’s trial, said the jury had not been in the courtroom at the time of the shooting.
Bailey said Nichols had made him and other jurors nervous. ”Every time he looked up, he was staring at you,” he told the news agency.
A spokesperson for the Atlanta Journal-Constitution said a features writer, Don O’Briant, had been parking his car when he was carjacked and hit in the eye. The spokesperson said he was not seriously injured.
Questions were raised about the safety of the court on Friday, especially the question of deputies’ weapons being within the reach of criminals. In many other courts, guards and police have to conceal their weapons.
”I’m only surprised it hasn’t happened before,” Renee Rockwell, an Atlanta defence lawyer, told CNN. Rockwell said she had seen deputies running with their guns drawn as she walked into the courthouse. ”They said, ‘The defendant got the deputy’s gun and shot the judge,’ ” she said.
The shooting took place less than two weeks after the husband and mother of a federal judge in Chicago were shot death. An unemployed electrician, whose attempts to sue a hospital for medical malpractice had been rejected by the judge, apparently committed suicide on Thursday, leaving a note admitting the killings.
The murders led to calls for better security for judges to shield them from intimidation.
A former New York police commissioner, Howard Safir, said the task of protecting judges was getting tougher.
”If the judicial system in this country cannot operate without intimidation, then everything that we value in this free society is going to be in danger,” Safir told CBS News. – Guardian Unlimited Â