[Ben E Lou]

The level of the security failures continues to grow as the details get out. The supposedly-monitored security camera in the area were Nichols attacked the female deputy captured the initial assult, but didn't help capture the suspect.

Camera rolled during attack
Control desk failed to notice assault
A surveillance camera captured Brian G. Nichols' surprise attack on a Fulton County sheriff's deputy, but no one in the control center noticed the assault and sent help, said a law enforcement official who viewed the security tape.

The camera, one of more than 40 stationed in the Fulton County courthouse, showed the 6-foot-1 Nichols assaulting Deputy Cynthia Hall and escaping with her gun. Hall was escorting Nichols to a holding cell before his rape retrial resumed.

Moments after the attack, which occurred before 9 a.m. Friday, witnesses say Nichols made his way through the courthouse and gunned down a judge, a court reporter and one of Hall's fellow deputies. Hours later, he allegedly killed a federal agent.

Hall remained in critical condition with severe head injuries at Grady Memorial Hospital.

"It's not just horrible, it was preventable," said Senior Superior Court Judge Philip Etheridge. Hall's relatives and friends in West Virginia, where the deputy grew up, also wondered why more security measures were not taken to reduce the chances of such an attack.

Some courthouse veterans say sheriff's department policies would have to be rewritten and deputies retrained to prevent similar attacks in the future.

Hall, they said, followed accepted security procedures in dealing with a prisoner, even though they put her at risk. Policies allow one deputy to escort as many as four inmates at a time.

At 8:48 a.m. on Friday, Hall took a handcuffed Nichols from the detention area at the bottom of the downtown Justice Center Tower and put him in an elevator to take him to an eighth-floor holding area. There, Nichols was to change into his civilian clothes and resume a rape retrial before Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes.

The holding room, which has two cells, is supposed to be a secure area between courtrooms in the modern Justice Center Tower.

A video camera, which is supposed to be monitored by two guards in a command post, shows the two arriving in the holding area between two courtrooms, according to a law enforcement official who viewed the tape.

The video shows Hall guiding Nichols, whose hands are still handcuffed behind his back, face-first into one of two open cells.

Hall releases one cuff and turns Nichols around to unhook the remaining cuff, which is dangling from his wrist. She uncuffs him so he can change from a jail jumpsuit into street clothes.

The muscular, 33-year-old Nichols then lunges at Hall, knocking the petite, 51-year-old woman backward into another cell. Both disappear from camera view because having a camera inside the actual holding cells is prohibited for privacy reasons. Two to three minutes later, Nichols emerges from the cell, holding Hall's gun belt and police radio. He picks up her keys from the floor and locks her inside the cell. Nichols then enters the empty cell.

A couple of minutes later, he emerges dressed in civilian clothes. He locks the door behind him and saunters calmly out of the holding area, carrying the gun belt, according to the law enforcement official who viewed the tape. Nichols appears to know which key to use to unlock the holding area door and enters a vacant courtroom on the eighth floor.

Nichols told Atlanta police that on the way out he retrieved the deputy's gun from a security lockbox where Hall had placed the weapon. He was able to get the weapon because he had Hall's keys.

Nichols then crosses the bridge to the eighth floor of the adjacent old Fulton County courthouse. Minutes later, the shooting began that mortally wounded Judge Barnes and court reporter Julie Ann Brandau.

Nichols strolled into Barnes' office from a side doorway and herded a real estate lawyer, the judge's secretary and a case manager into the judge's private chambers. He then captured Deputy Grantley White, handcuffed him and put him into a closet.

Moments later, the hostages heard two gunshots and screaming.

Witnesses say Nichols entered the courtroom from a door behind Barnes' bench and fatally shot him and Brandau.

It was only then that the first distress call went out.

White, who was handcuffed, stumbled out of a closet in Barnes' office and used his radio to broadcast a "Signal 63," indicating that an officer needed backup.

No deputies knew Hall was critically injured.

In the detention center of the Justice Center Tower, at least eight deputies took the elevator to the eighth floor on their way to Barnes' court. They hurried through the holding area where Nichols had left Hall, not realizing she was on a cell floor. She was discovered after Deputy White reported to responding deputies that Hall was missing.

Barnes had requested additional security for Nichols' trial after deputies found two sharp door hinges in the defendant's socks earlier in the week, said Gayle Abramson, the lead Fulton County prosecutor handling Nichols' case. At a news conference Saturday, Sheriff Myron Freeman said he didn't know whether Hall knew of the increased threat or whether extra precautions had been taken.

"She shouldn't have been there to start with," Judge Etheridge said, referring to the size disparity between Hall, a petite grandmother, and Nichols, a former college linebacker.

"There should have been at least two, possibly three, good-sized deputies and they should have been warned," Etheridge said.

Deputies said a security flaw is that cells at the courthouse have solid doors, which leaves a solitary guard like Hall vulnerable to attack. Ideally, a deputy should be able to lock a prisoner inside the cell and have the prisoner stick his or her hands through door slot to be cuffed or uncuffed to ensure the deputy's security.

"Whoever designed that area had never handled inmates before," said a courthouse security veteran.

After attacking Hall and killing Barnes and Brandau, Nichols reportedly gunned down Sheriff's Deputy Hoyt Teasley outside the courthouse in downtown Atlanta and later killed David Wilhelm, an assistant special agent in charge of the Immigration and Customs Enforcement's Atlanta office.