Carjack victim: Nichols said, 'I have blood on my hands.'

<p>Minutes after a deadly courthouse rampage, a gun-wielding Brian Nichols carjacked a newspaper employee and, to get her to obey him, told her, "Can't you see I have blood on my hands?" the victim testified Monday.</p><p>During a hearing in which defense lawyers for Nichols were trying to block her testimony and that of 16 other witnesses, Almeta Kilgo also said she is sure that Nichols was the one who stole her car at gunpoint on March 11, 2005, in a parking garage less than a mile from the Fulton County Courthouse.</p><p>A prosecutor showed Kilgo a photo of the person she identified to police as the man who confronted her, and Kilgo responded, "This is a photo of Brian Nichols."</p><p>Another witness, Iman Adan, testified at the hearing that Nichols tried to force her at gunpoint into her Buckhead apartment hours after the courthouse shooting while he was in search of a place to hide, and told her, "All the police and everybody in Atlanta were at war" with him.</p><p>Defense lawyers have alleged that Kilgo's and Adan's identifications _ and those of the other witnesses they seek to block _ were influenced by improper police tactics. They want Superior Court Judge Hilton Fuller to suppress the identifications and to prevent the witnesses from testifying at Nichols' murder trial, which is scheduled to begin Jan. 11.</p><p>Nichols was being retried on rape charges when prosecutors say he stole a deputy's handgun at the courthouse after the deputy removed his handcuffs to allow him to change out of his jail clothes and prepare for court.</p><p>Authorities say Nichols fatally shot the judge presiding over his rape trial, a court reporter chronicling the proceeding and a sheriff's deputy who chased him outside the courthouse. He's also accused of committing several carjackings while on the run _ including one involving Kilgo and a second involving another newspaper employee _ and killing a federal agent he encountered at a home north of downtown. Nichols surrendered the next day after allegedly taking a woman hostage in an Atlanta suburb.</p><p>Nichols has pleaded not guilty. If he is convicted, prosecutors plan to seek the death penalty.</p><p>In their motion on the witnesses, defense lawyers say some out-of-court identifications of Nichols are unreliable because of suggestive comments made by police and because of other investigative procedures. As a result, the defense says those witnesses should be prevented from making the same identifications at trial.</p><p>There are numerous other witnesses _ including people who were in the courtroom or the judge's chambers at the time the shootings began, and the woman at whose home Nichols surrendered _ who are not covered by this defense motion.</p><p>At Monday's hearing, a police investigator, J.T. Brayboy, testified that he showed Kilgo only a single photo _ one of Nichols _ during her initial statement a few hours after the carjacking and shootings at the courthouse. Brayboy acknowledged on cross-examination that proper police procedure would have been to show Kilgo photos of at least six different people so as to not influence her identification.</p><p>Brayboy said that was initially his plan, but when an officer handed him Nichols' picture first, Kilgo saw it and blurted out, "That's the person." The investigator said that after that, there was no need to show Kilgo photos of other people.</p><p>As for Adan, a Somali immigrant who worked in room service at a Ritz-Carlton hotel at the time of the incident, she pointed at Nichols in court Monday and said she is sure that he is the person who held a gun to her back the night of March 11 and tried to force her into her apartment. She did say, however, that she had seen Nichols' face on television prior to him confronting her and before she initially told police about him.</p><p>On cross-examination, defense lawyer Henderson Hill asked Adan if she remembered saying previously that when police first showed her Nichols' picture, it was the police who said, "This is the guy." But she denied that she had said that or that that happened.</p><p>A friend of Adan's who was at her apartment that night, Shelton Warren, testified that Nichols pistol-whipped him in the head twice before running off. Warren said he was able to keep Nichols from entering Adan's apartment.</p><p>There were no immediate rulings by the judge.</p><p>Also expected to be argued at Monday's hearing is another defense motion seeking to bar an inmate whose cell was next to Nichols' from testifying about an alleged plot the two were hatching to escape from the county jail since the shootings.</p>

http://accesswdun.com/article/2006/10/114783