Brian Nichols in Atlanta: PC Kills… Again

By Nicholas Stix

(Part II: Aiding and Abetting: Feminism and the Brian Nichols Case)

March 16, 2005
Last updated 6:50 p.m., March 20, 2005.

It wasn’t a tragedy. We’ve been hearing about what a “tragedy” Brian Nichols’ “alleged” murders of four people and brutal beatings of several others were. Bull. According to the ancient Greek definition, tragedy is what happens when a great man’s strength turns into his own worst enemy and undoes him, e.g., pride. A more modern definition is of a terrible incident that was no one’s fault, and could not have been avoided. Say, a driver following the traffic laws loses control of his vehicle, and kills a pedestrian crossing the street.

When people use the term “tragedy” to describe a heinous act, they often seek to diminish its moral significance, as per the second definition. Thus, ever since 911, anti-American lefties have described the terrorist attacks of that day as “the tragedy of 911.” There is nothing tragic about what Brian Nichols “allegedly” did on March 11. If anything, the way he “allegedly” carried out his deeds suggests a diabolical criminal mastermind out of a novel, who painstakingly planned out his escape and his initial murders. And yet, we can lay four corpses and several brutalized though living victims at the feet of incompetence that was the product of feminism and racism. For had the Fulton County district attorney’s or sheriff’s office shown any professionalism, as opposed to being guided by feminist and racist practices, Brian Nichols would never have been in the Fulton County Superior Court on March 11, and Judge Rowland Barnes, court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, Sheriff’s Deputy Sergeant Hoyt Teasley and ICE Agent David Wilhelm would all still be alive today.

To get a preliminary look at the role of the politically correct mentality at work in the Nichols case, let’s contrast the depiction of the case as it unfolded on Saturday, March 12, between CNN and the Fox News Channel.
 
 
Cable News Follies

On March 12, I bounced back and forth between CNN and Fox News’ coverage of the case. On CNN in the early afternoon, the on-air personalities were concerned as to how Nichols could have “snapped.” They emphasized that he came from a “good” (read: middle-class) family, had a “good” job at UPS, was intelligent (he had supposedly taught himself a high level of computer savvy and how to play a musical instrument), and polite. CNN’s personalities spoke of Nichols having been guarded by only “one deputy,” taking pains to avoid the issue of the deputy’s sex.

At the Fox News Channel, a very different profile emerged, of a man who had been involved in crime, albeit petty crime, his entire adult life. Nichols was a linebacker at Kutztown State University, but was caught stealing, arrested, and expelled. He had been arrested several times over the years. Rather than saying Nichols had a “good job,” the Fox hosts noted that he had bounced from job to job. And Fox News’ personalities repeatedly asked how a woman could have been charged with guarding a tall, powerfully built man charged with violent crimes.

Eventually, the Fox News personalities also got around to the “how did he snap?” nonsense.

Fox News reporter Geraldo Rivera saw a strong parallel to the DC Sniper case in how a shooter terrorized an area, but the parallel was frivolous. In the DC Sniper case, initially no one knew the identities of the shooters, but Montgomery County Police followed a false lead that the shooters were white males. When Montgomery County Police Chief Dr. Charles Moose was able to determine through a telephone conversation with one of the killers that the latter was black, he withheld that crucial new information from law enforcement and the public alike. And so, while everyone looked for the wrong people, more victims were murdered.

In the Nichols case, law enforcement did the opposite: They broadcast the best information they had. (In both cases, the police officials were black.) The problem was that Nichols cleverly misled law enforcement into thinking that he was driving Atlanta Journal-Constitution reporter Don O’Briant’s green Honda Accord. (Nichols carjacked the Accord, parked it on another level of the same parking garage, walked across the street and boarded a MARTA (Metropolitan Atlanta Rapid Transit Authority) subway train to a nearby shopping center.)
 
 
Funny Papers

But if CNN was guilty of politically correct coverage of the Nichols case, they were pikers, compared to alleged reporter Beth Warren, also of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, who embodies what I call the banality of bias.

In an article in which Warren listed one example after another of Nichols’ racism, she concluded that his crimes were not racially motivated. Right. Just like with Colin Ferguson, the Long Island Railroad mass murderer.

Brian G. Nichols considered himself a “soldier on a mission” the day he terrorized a courthouse and a city with a gun, according to a law enforcement official who witnessed Nichols first statement to authorities.

The official said Nichols, who was being tried in a rape case when Friday’s deadly shooting spree occurred, considered himself a wrongly accused man in a legal system unfair to African-Americans….

In an interview with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the official said Nichols described how he had been stewing in jail while awaiting retrial on charges that he held his ex-girlfriend hostage and sexually assaulted her. The first jury couldn’t agree and the judge declared a mistrial.

Nichols said he was angry that many of the inmates around him were also black and he wondered how many were innocent.

[Based on what former Fulton County Assistant DA Denise A. Sorino told me in a telephone interview, one could more accurately conclude that Nichols had been surrounded by violent, persistent felony offenders, who typically had “over a page of priors.” ]

“He called it systematic slavery,” the law enforcement official said.

Nichols didn’t feel he was mistreated by deputies at the jail or courthouse, the official said. But he also didn’t care that the deputies he would soon hurt were black. His anger was focused more on the legal system than race. And the main target was Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, who was preparing to resume hearing Nichols’ rape trial.

But Warren admits that Nichols said that “the attack [on Judge Barnes] wasn’t personal. In fact, he told authorities he thought Barnes had been fair to him during court proceedings.”

Warren hears ‘race, race, race,’ but concludes, ‘not race.’ Why, if Nichols felt that Judge Barnes had been fair to him, would he kill him anyway? Because the judge was a white authority figure. Why would he kill the white court reporter, but none of the blacks in the room with her? Because she was white. And she wasn’t even an authority figure!
 
 
Atlanta: A Felons’ Paradise

As for Nichols’ claim that criminal justice is a case of “systematic slavery” against black men, in reality, Atlanta is closer to paradise for the city’s predominantly black felons, though not for their majority-black victims. In recent years, tens of thousands of crimes have gone unprosecuted due to “lost” 911 calls, “disappeared” crimes by police, and incompetence and preferential treatment given certain classes of suspects (athletes and clergymen) by DA Paul Howard. Denise A. Sorino, who worked in Howard’s office for three years, and who supports the movement to have him recalled, told me that in 1999, she and her colleagues were working on thousands of cases going back as far as 1994, all of which were dropped, and thousands of which never even reached the indictment stage.

There are over 80 ADAs, and each one of them has over 100 cases to plea and arraign…. This is a guess, but 90 percent of these indictments, each of these defendants had more than one page of priors, and it was incredible that half of these people were still walking out on the street.

Why the backlog? When Howard was elected DA in 1996, most of the DA’s staff consisted of experienced, white attorneys. According to Sorino, who is white, Howard fired most of the whites, and replaced them with blacks who were inexperienced, and often incompetent.
Other critics of Howard have made the same charge, though in more circumspect language. Local white talk show host and former Atlanta Journal Constitution writer Dick Williams says, for instance, that “the District Attorney’s Office under Paul Howard has fallen apart, ‘cause he replaced all the old guys and brought in his people.”
 
 
The Magic Word

Note Brian Nichols’ claim that one of his white carjacking and assault victims, AJC reporter Don O’Briant, called him a racial epithet. O’Briant said in his defense, “Nichols pistol-whipped him because he refused orders to get in the trunk.

The only other thing I said besides “No” is “Please.” When someone has a gun pointed at you, the last thing you’re going to do is taunt them. All I was trying to do was get away.

Don O’Briant is a middle-aged, white reporter at a politically correct newspaper, in a majority-black city ruled by apartheid. He is more likely to sprout wings and fly, than to call a large black man pointing a gun at him a racial slur. Why did Nichols make such a claim?

In New York, where I have lived since August 1985, such phony claims by black racists have long been an everyday occurrence. Black racists call whites racial epithets, harass them, and assault them. (In 1991, a white NYPD detective confirmed that black-on-white racial assaults are a daily occurrence, adding that the NYPD covers up the attacks racial character.) Then, should a white victim complain or call the police, the black perpetrator says that the victim called him a racial epithet. Even if a witness should corroborate the white victim’s story, the phony charge functions as the black perpetrator’s get-out-of-jail-free card. Never mind, that everyone in New York knows that whites virtually never call blacks racial epithets, or that, as a matter of law, it would be irrelevant, even if they did.

I have only witnessed a white calling a black a racial epithet twice, and can recall hearing whites use a racial epithet to describe blacks in private only three times. All five times involved the “n” word. During the same period, I have heard the “n” word uttered in public approximately one million times—at least 95 percent by blacks, and perhaps five percent by Puerto Ricans.

The first white who I heard publicly call a black the “n” word was a teenaged drug dealer in Far Rockaway, Queens, one of America’s most racist, violent slums. That was in 1995 or ‘96. Interestingly, no blacks in the neighborhood who heard the white thug shouting the term down the block at a black competitor from outside the neighborhood, accused the white of racism or assaulted him.

The second case was in 1998, and involved a wheelchair-bound, septuagenarian patient in the nearby nursing home, Rockaway Care, where I was moonlighting as a certified nurse aide. The elderly patient only used the epithet after his powerfully-built, approximately 30-year-old black roommate had terrorized and assaulted him for three days, often in front of the staff. When I asked the black registered nurse in charge (though the patients were predominantly white, the staff was almost entirely black) whether she was going to protect the old white man, she muttered that he had used the n-word, so he was getting his due. (In New York, just about any time a black racially assaults a white, black witnesses will say that the white “deserved” it, even when they don’t claim that the white said a racial epithet. Conversely, the 1989 Yusuf Hawkins racial murder was only solved because white witnesses immediately cooperated with police.) The assaults finally (to my knowledge) ended after I had a confrontation with the black attacker, he complained about me to the aforementioned nurse, and she gave the white victim his own room.

The first time I encountered the “he-called-me-the-n-word” defense, was in 1993. At 1:30 a.m. on a Manhattan subway platform, an 18-year-old black girl called ME the n-word, as a prelude to stabbing me with a scissors. Unbeknownst to me, someone called the police, whose officer in charge of the crime scene later told me that a witness (the same person?) had corroborated my story.

And yet when I was interviewed, weeks later, by a white assistant DA named Kunkel, Kunkel denied that I was a crime victim at all. Kunkel ignored the witness report, the fact that someone else had called the police, the police photograph of the bloody defensive wound on my hand, and the report by the crime scene officer. Instead, he acted as if the girl’s incredible charge that I had called her the “n” word were gospel, and insinuated that I was a racist who went around getting innocent young blacks arrested. “Because of you, two black girls spent a night in jail!” he thundered at me. (The attacker was accompanied by a girlfriend.)

During the mid-‘90s, a spate of such phony claims by racist New York blacks actually made it to the SMSM (socialist mainstream media). In each case, the white “racist” in question was supposed to have called blacks the “n” word not in a white racial redoubt, but in a black-dominated environment.

One case was initiated by school staffers, teachers, administrators and parents at P.S. 80, in Jamaica, Queens who were followers of black supremacists the Rev. Al Sharpton and the late extortionist-kidnapper-murderer Sonny Carson, in an attempt to get white teacher Rita Altman fired. Another case was a shakedown attempt by two black businessmen, who made the charge against a white waiter at black ex-model Barbara Smith’s restaurant, B. Smith. A third case was manufactured by black aide Marshall Mitchell, who worked for black then-New York City Cong. Floyd Flake (D-Queens).

The institutionalized understanding in New York at the time (and since) was that all a black racist had to do was claim a white had called him a racial epithet, in order to get the law, morality, and common sense suspended. The whites who play this particular game, use it to wage class war against white crime victims. For instance, the one bit of honesty I got out of ADA Kunkel, was his admission that he never took the subway at night. He lived out of taxicabs.

For New York’s Kunkels, white guys like me, who have to ride the subway, are “losers.” The Kunkels take taxicabs driven overwhelmingly by non-whites, who avoid picking up black men. The Kunkels take cabs in order to avoid black men, who scare the bejeesus out of them, while publicly condemning taxicab drivers as “racist.”

The following year, when I told the above story to a black New Jersey (NJTransit) bus driver who had recently fled Brooklyn, he asked rhetorically of my encounter with Kunkel, “Did you bring a lawyer?” The driver knew better than I did, that a crime victim must show that he has a well-paid attorney, thus signifying his social class. When the Kunkels see that they are dealing with a class peer or even superior, they take pains to respect one’s rights as a crime victim.

While New York is 25 percent black and already a bastion of black apartheid, Atlanta is much worse. According to the 2000 census, Atlanta is 62 percent black and 34 percent white, and as conservative commentator and radio host Dick Williams put it in his genteel way on the March 14 O’Reilly Report on the Fox News Channel,

[Atlanta] is mostly concerned with things African-American. Ever since Mayor Jackson was elected mayor back in the ‘70s, everything has swung toward the political correct idea, the black idea. You gotta have a black police chief, you gotta have a black sheriff, and they won elections to the Sheriff’s Office on their own merit, but, but everything, like Paul Howard’s comment [that a woman can guard a male suspect charged with violent crimes just as well as a man can], which was just silly, of course, that’s the way the world works in the City of Atlanta, aided and abetted by the newspapers.

Williams also noted that while “the jury is out” on Atlanta police Chief Richard Pennington, “The police departments been in chaos” for years.

Also appearing on the show, Michael King, of the black conservative group Project 21, concurred with Williams’ appraisal.

Absolutely. Atlanta has been portrayed as this black Mecca of black development, of black leadership around the country, and as a whole, especially on the business side, that’s certainly correct. But when you extend that into the government sector, and when you ignore competent individuals, in place of or in favor of making sure that someone black is in place, then you end up with situations like this, you end up with Paul Howard, you end up with a sheriff like Myron Freeman sitting there, twiddling their thumbs, if you will, as opposed to things getting done properly.

Prof. Moriarty vs. the Keystone Kops?

Already on March 12, “experts” began blaming the Atlanta PD for not finding the green Accord or catching Nichols sooner, saying police were “too reactive, and not pro-active enough.” Aside from the imbecilic thought processes and redundancy of such clichés, given the rank incompetence of the Fulton County Sheriff’s and District Attorney’s offices, and Nichols’ combination of brilliance and ruthlessness, I don’t see how someone can talk that way. Nichols did everything but eat his victims’ livers.

It turns out that Chief Richard Pennington’s men did screw up, though not in the sense of the slogans being bandied about. If anything they were overly aggressive.

As attendants at the parking garage recounted to AJC reporters Bill Torpy and Stacy Shelton, they called police when Nichols showed up at the parking garage. A police motorcycle and two squad cars quickly arrived, but the officers ignored the attendants’ pleas (and Policework 101) to guard the street level, which the attendants explained to police was the only way out of the garage. Instead, all three vehicles sped up the ramps, allowing Brian Nichols to walk down the stairs to freedom.

And how could Don O’Briant tell police that Brian Nichols asked for directions to a nearby shopping mall, where the latter then spent hours meandering about without police, who had his picture, catching him? Note that leftwing and black nationalist journalists, academics, and activists have long spread the canard, according to which all black men look the same to white police and security personnel, while arguing that blacks have no problem distinguishing between different black men.

Other critics have also argued that the Atlanta PD should have shut down MARTA (or indeed, all traffic in the immediate vicinity), and sealed off the parking garage and searched for the green Accord. But I’m going to be modest, and will settle for the 20/100 hindsight of criticizing police for their failure to guard the parking garage’s exit.

The havoc that a highly intelligent, cunning, ultraviolent prisoner can wreak once he has escaped is why it’s so important for everyone at each point along the line to do his job. You don’t have to be a rocket scientist or Superman in order to catch a bad guy again, if you don’t let him get away in the first place. But it does help to have an IQ above that of a ditch digger.

When Richard Pennington took over the Atlanta PD in 2002, he formed a non-profit organization which had the department’s 911 calls for 2002 audited. (Pennington had made his name as New Orleans police chief, where he reportedly reformed what had been the nation’s most corrupt force.) Chief Pennington determined that the reports from 22,000 911 calls had been lost during that year alone. Atlanta only has 416,000 residents.

Chief Pennington has admitted that his department screwed up, but his idea of reform is to dumb down the method for calling in incidents. Instead of the shorthand that police departments across the nation use to save time in notifying dispatchers, Chief Pennington is calling for using “plain English.” So, instead of simply saying, “10-13!” officers would presumably say, “Officer in need of assistance!” Why not instead hire men who can understand what a “10-13” is?

The Atlanta PD’s problems run deep, and largely have to do with hiring incompetents based solely on the color of their skin. Like other departments across the country, it has apparently been hiring black applicants who are functionally illiterate and/or personally unsuited for police work. Somehow, I don’t see Chief Pennington or anyone else in Atlanta calling for confronting the department’s real problems.
 
 
Shoot the Sheriff

Fulton County Sheriff Myron Freeman, wounded Deputy Cynthia Ann Hall’s boss, ought to be recalled by voters post haste. At the Saturday afternoon press conference following Brian Nichols’ arrest, Sheriff Freeman said “My first priority was the families … my second priority was getting Mr. Nichols back in jail.” That was designed to show his compassion, but if Sheriff Freeman hadn’t been so incompetent, he wouldn’t have had to console the victims’ families. The sheriff kept repeating that he had only been on the job for two months, but the problems with the sheriff’s office had been public knowledge in Atlanta for years. There was no need for four murders to serve as a wake-up call, and Freeman is unlikely to change for the better.

The sheriff’s lack of urgency regarding catching a heinous criminal, is unfortunately typical of an entire city, in which police officials have long seen their job as not fighting, but covering up crime, so as to help the tourist trade, and where in an opinion survey of Atlantans, much to Chief Pennington’s chagrin, “only 27 percent saw crime as the city’s No. 1 problem.” Meanwhile, Atlanta vies for the dubious distinction of being known as the nation’s most violent city. I think racial solidarity is the reason so many Atlantans claim to be relatively unconcerned about crime.

Sheriff Freeman kept emphasizing that he had only been on the job for two months. That’s two months too long. At first, I thought that perhaps the Sheriff was in shock or exhausted. After hearing him a while, however, I realized he’s simply a dim bulb. If Brian Nichols had the sense to figure out the holes in courthouse security, but Sheriff Freeman didn’t, maybe the authorities need to switch the two men. Put Freeman in jail and charge him with murder, etc., and make Nichols sheriff. If that sounds insane, it’s no crazier than a world in which a Myron Freeman can be responsible for court security.

DA Paul Howard should also be recalled, along with Sheriff Freeman.
Indeed, there is already a movement afoot to recall Howard, who was first elected in 1996. The DA’s office botched the first Nichols prosecution, leading to the retrial. Although Nichols was found to be in the possession of ten pounds of marijuana and two assault weapons when he was arrested, he was tried for rape, sodomy, and kidnapping. The jury never heard about the weapons or the drugs, and Howard’s incompetent, lazy ADAs provided them with little corroborating evidence, even though they had access to massive amounts of evidence. As a result, the jury almost acquitted Nichols, deadlocking with eight jurors out of twelve voting to acquit. As Brian Nichols’ defense attorney Barry Hazen noted, the state put on a “much more muscular” presentation in the retrial: “In the second trial, there was a lot more evidence that was corroborated,” which is why Nichols knew he was going down. (To do justice to DA Howard’s documented incompetence and venality would require much more space than I have at present.)

Thus, Brian Nichols wasn’t fighting injustice; he was fighting justice!

(Some people are convinced that Nichols was innocent of the rape charges against him. Note that AJC reporters Cameron McWhirter, Bill Rankin, and Steve Visser have suggested that the method that March 12 hostage Ashley Smith reported that Nichols used in binding her with duct tape, and initially putting her in the shower, matched the method that his ex-girlfriend charged him with using during his alleged kidnapping and rape of her on August 19.)
 
 
Nichols: Breaks with Criminal Stereotypes

I am convinced that while not all of Nichols’ plans worked out, he nonetheless put a great deal of planning into his crimes. The safest thing for him to do, in terms of escaping the court house, would have been to flee immediately, once he had disarmed Deputy Hall, after perhaps handcuffing and gagging her. That way, using his method of rapid, serial carjacking, he might well have made it out of the state on Friday. Instead, he made a point of GOING to Judge Barnes’ chambers, and proceeding to murder Barnes and Julie Ann Brandau. Sgt. Hoyt Teasly’s killing clearly was unplanned. The sergeant just got in Nichols’ way; he was “collateral damage.”

When criminals seek to escape from the police, they tend to think with their feet, not their heads, which is one reason why they usually get caught so quickly. Often, the panic starts before the crime has even been completed. How many times do you hear, in what journalistic boilerplate calls “botched robberies,” of a mugger who panics and kills his intended victim, running off without even getting the latter’s money or valuables? Some of those cases were surely racial murders, in which robbery was a secondary or non-existent goal, and the “botched robbery” cliché was a journalistic diversion tactic to avoid reporting the truth, but many were cases of criminals who simply lost their heads. As a rule, violent crime has never attracted a particularly high-class sort of individual. In contrast, Nichols’ defense attorney Barry Hazen described Nichols as “very analytic” and a “very quick learner.”

However, many procedures broke down, providing Nichols with one opportunity after another:

• The office of District Attorney Paul Howard provided no serious additional security, despite a request from presiding Judge Rowland Barnes for additional “beef,” after Nichols had been caught with two “shank” weapons in his shoes that he had fashioned from hinges. (Judge Barnes was more concerned with the dangers posed to Nichols’ defense attorney, Barry Hazen, than with his own protection.) In a telephone interview, Denise A. Sorino told me that the only reason Nichols was in that changing room, was because DA Howard’s office had so thoroughly botched the first trial. Sorino’s judgment of Nichols’ first trial was implicitly supported by Nichols’ attorney, Hazen;

• Sheriff Myron Freeman had entrusted a 5’1” female deputy with guarding a former college linebacker whose body was “solid muscle,” who was charged with violent felonies, and who was facing a possible life sentence; and

• The deputies entrusted with monitoring the changing room via closed circuit TV were criminally negligent. They were absent or off doing God knows what (one report has them fetching breakfast for a superior), while Deputy Hall was getting beaten half to death on camera, and when Nichols was running out of the court building.

Sheriff Freeman, DA Howard, and Chief Pennington might just as well have given Nichols a law enforcement escort out of the city.

(Part II: Aiding and Abetting: Feminism and the Brian Nichols Case )