DULUTH, Ga. — The rape suspect sought for the shooting rampage in a downtown Atlanta courthouse that killed a judge and two other people gave up without a fight 26 hours later Saturday when a SWAT team surrounded the suburban apartment complex where he had invaded a woman's home.
It was a 911 call from her that brought what was described as the biggest hunt for a fugitive in Georgia history to its end. To communicate his willingness to surrender, Brian Gene Nichols brandished a white T-shirt or towel from the woman's ground-floor apartment, where he was holed up.
"I think he waved a white flag because he was cornered, and had no place to go," said Vernon Keenan, director of the Georgia Bureau of Investigation.
Nichols, 33, was handed over to custody of the FBI because he had become the suspect in a fourth slaying: the shooting death of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent David G. Wilhelm, whose body was discovered in the home the agent was building in the upscale north Atlanta neighborhood of Buckhead.
The agent's Glock pistol, shield and Chevrolet truck were missing, authorities said, and the pickup was later found a few miles from the apartment in Duluth, 20 miles north of Atlanta, where Nichols was captured.
Authorities had lost track of the suspected gunman, but were tipped off to his whereabouts when the tenant of the apartment, reportedly with the fugitive's consent, left and called emergency services. Police said Nichols apparently had forced his way into the apartment when the unidentified woman came home.
"It's my understanding that he had told her, 'If you do what I say, I won't kill you,' " Keenan said.
CNN, the Atlanta cable news channel, quoted police as saying that at about 2 a.m. Saturday, Nichols pushed the unidentified woman into her apartment at gunpoint, and tied her up while he pondered his next move. He reportedly compelled his hostage to follow him when he dumped the federal agent's truck several miles away, and they returned to the apartment in her car.
For the next few hours, they reportedly talked, until the woman apparently persuaded her captor to let her go.
"She was not panicked, she handled it very responsibly," said Charles M. Walters, police chief of Gwinnett County. "She was a champ."
When in response to her 911 call more than two-dozen SWAT team members deployed around the Bridgewater Apartments, Nichols concluded his wisest course of action was to give up, Walters said. Nichols had been keeping tabs on the search for him by watching television, the police chief said.
