Monday, March 14, 2005

Remarkable piece on the Atlanta shooter...

...in the Palm Beach Post, of all papers. It is an interview with the woman whose apartment Brian G. Nichols, the courthouse shooter, hid out in during his final hours of freedom. That she survived is a minor miracle, but the extraordinary account of the time she shared with Nichols is gripping and puts a human face on a killer whose scowling picture has been broadcast around the world. It brought home all the accounts of Nichols's high school friends, all of whom described a friendly and popular guy who exhibited no sign of one day blowing up the way he did. I don't know how to feel about all this as yet; while I am usually unsympathetic to criminals, this was unsettling in the way that he became, almost, a nice guy. For a moment there.
I also believe he wanted to be caught; else why let her go out, unsupervised, to see her daughter? Anyway.

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