Tuesday marks 20 years since Kiley Barnes’ father was killed in a stunning series of events at the Fulton County Courthouse, but for many, it still feels like it happened just yesterday.
Barnes’ father, Fulton County Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, was handling a business dispute on the morning of March 11, 2005 when Brian Nichols, a man on trial for rape, appeared behind him shooting and killing Barnes, who was presiding over his trial.
Kiley heard from acquaintances who told her to go to Grady Memorial Hospital after the shooting, but she later received a call from her stepmother telling her that Barnes had died. She was lost and devastated, describing her father as her soulmate.
“When I say it just feels like it happened yesterday, it’s just the grief and the sadness is still as prevalent today as it was back then,” Barnes said. “It does not seem like it’s been (20 years). I can’t believe it. I still can’t believe it’s been that long.”
As a judge, Barnes was fair with a good sense of humor who cared about justice and loved his job, Kiley Barnes said, but as a father, he was much more than that.
“He was great, very understanding, very compassionate, up until literally the day he died he was helping me,” Barnes, who was trying to become a lawyer, said.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Attorney Richard Robbins was inside Barnes’ courtroom when the shooting occurred. He remembers hearing the sound of the gun, seeing Judge Barnes with a hole in his head falling out of his seat, but the memory of court reporter Julie Ann Brandau being shot and killed by Nichols feels “blocked out.”
He recalls Nichols pointing the gun at him, before Robbins fled the courtroom.
“It’s 20 years and I can still remember every minute of it,” Robbins said. “It seems like a long time and it is a long time, but my memories are still fresh.”
Robbins said the year after the shooting was brutal, where he suffered shock and post-traumatic stress disorder. It wasn’t until the 10th anniversary that he could talk about it without getting emotional. He said it changed the way he practices law and made him a better attorney in the end.
“I don’t have any nervousness or fear in the courtroom, fear of losing anything like that, so it’s made me a stronger lawyer. An incident like that either breaks you or makes you stronger. Fortunately, it made me stronger,” Robbins said, adding he will be in trial on Tuesday in a courtroom just above Judge Barnes’ old courtroom.
Before storming into the courtroom, Nichols had overpowered a sheriff’s deputy in the courthouse, beating her into a coma and taking her gun. He changed into civilian clothes and ran to Judge Barnes’ chambers, where he held several people hostage and overpowered another deputy before walking into the adjacent courtroom and shooting Barnes and Brandau.
Nichols fled the courthouse and killed Fulton County sheriff’s Sgt. Hoyt Teasley, who tried to stop him outside the building. He then encountered two Atlanta Journal-Constitution employees and stole a Honda vehicle from one of them.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Later that day, he encountered off-duty federal agent David Wilhelm at a home under construction in Buckhead, where he shot and killed him. He fled the scene to Duluth, where he approached a woman parking her car around 2 a.m., put a gun to her back and forced her into her apartment.
Nichols eventually let her go and Nichols surrendered outside the Duluth apartment before being put in handcuffs.
Barry Hazen, Nichols' defense attorney for the rape case, said he felt his client was reaching a boiling point, but he just didn’t know things would get as bad as they did. The first trial against Nichols had ended with a hung jury, and tension had built up between Nichols and Judge Barnes over the course of both trials, Hazen said.
“One of the last things I said to my wife before I left the house on Friday morning the day of the shooting, was, ‘I do not feel safe in that courtroom because I thought something’s going to blow,’” Hazen said.
Credit: Kimberly Smith / ksmith@ajc.com
Credit: Kimberly Smith / ksmith@ajc.com
Hazen, who still practices law, was walking from his office a few blocks away from the courthouse when he heard a bunch of sirens and saw deputies rushing out of the courthouse. A deputy approached him before pushing him into the doorway and telling him “your client just shot the judge.”
Over the next couple of hours, Hazen was worried about his family and his law firm. He called his wife and told her to take their daughter out of school and not to go home, he called his office and told them to close for the day. He didn’t know if Nichols intended to target him next.
“We didn’t know where he was or what he was thinking, if he was, violent and irrational, there was no telling who he was going to target,” Hazen said.
Hazen said he was taken to the old police station on Ponce de Leon Avenue where he was able to provide a photograph of Nichols to police as the manhunt for him continue throughout the area.
Candee Wilhelm remembers waking up the morning of March 11, 2005 and watching the news with her husband, David, and seeing there had been a shooting at the courthouse. They didn’t think much of it at the time.
Credit: Provided by Candee Wilhelm
Credit: Provided by Candee Wilhelm
The couple, who had been married for six years but together for 12, had just moved to Atlanta about six months before and were living in a townhouse in Peachtree City while they were building a house in Buckhead. David had come to an agreement with the builder to allow him to do the tile work in the bathroom, so he was working there when Candee stopped by with lunch.
The two had lunch in his truck. Nichols was still on the loose and police were looking for him.
“I was there until like about 8 o’clock and I left to go home and he was still working. After a while, I called him to check on him and his phone just went straight to voicemail so I didn’t really know exactly what was going on,” she said.
It would be the last time she would see David alive. Nichols approached the house, shooting and killing Wilhelm before stealing his truck, gun and badge. His body was discovered the next day by two carpenters.
“He had a really good sense of humor, so he touched a lot of people with that. He would sort of like play pranks on people, wrote poems and stuff, leave them funny voicemails and things so every now and then I’ll hear from someone that he really affected and it just makes me happy,” Wilhelm said.
Months after the shooting, Nichols was indicted on 54 counts including murder and felony murder with prosecutors announcing their intention to seek the death penalty. The trial started in September 2008 in Atlanta Municipal Court.
Credit: Hyosub Shin / hshin@ajc.com
Credit: Hyosub Shin / hshin@ajc.com
In December 2008, Nichols was convicted on all counts and sentenced to multiple life sentences, with the jury unable to reach a unanimous decision on the death penalty.
Wilhelm felt Nichols deserved the death penalty for what he did not only to her and David’s family but to everyone else involved. Robbins, who testified at trial, said he tried to persuade Nichols’ attorneys to plead guilty and get a life sentence rather than dragging the case on with a death penalty trial.
“He didn’t get the death penalty, which was pretty disgusting. He didn’t have any redeeming qualities, frankly,” Robbins said. “When I was testifying, I looked at him in the courtroom and he didn’t even look up. It was like there was no remorse. He was sitting there looking bored and never even looked at me.”
A couple of weeks after the shooting, Hazen got a call from another attorney, who was a friend of Judge Barnes. He told Hazen that Barnes had indicated to him the night before the shooting that he was planning to grant a directed verdict of acquittal, so Nichols would have gone free.
Years later, he would hear the same story from former Brookhaven Chief of Police Gary Yandura, who knew Barnes.
“It looks to me like, I don’t know if Nichols even knows this, but Nichols killed the guy who was going to cut him loose,” Hazen said.
Credit: John Spink
Credit: John Spink
Hazen said he now tries to be more careful and attentive about somebody’s body language, facial expression and what their motivations might be. He has thought over the years whether “there was something I could have done to bring my fears and my concern to somebody’s attention that might have prevented this.”
Candee Wilhelm said people still come up to her to tell her stories about David, which, in a way, has helped her heal over the past two decades. Every year, she visits David’s grave and along with her husband to clean it and put flowers to remember him.
“I feel blessed to have been his wife and I’m just grateful for that because some people never get that opportunity to meet their special person and he was definitely that,” she said.
About the Author
Keep Reading
The Latest
Featured
