A bit too close to home

This morning, defendant Brian Nicols apparently grabbed a gun from a deputy at the Fulton County Courthouse in Atlanta and killed the judge and clerk of the court. He also shot two deputies, one of whom died at the hospital. He escaped from the courthouse, carjacked himself a ride, and is currently fleeing from a manhunt that's making national news. All of this has made for quite a lot of talk here at work, naturally. There's lots of speculation on how this happened, whether he'll survive to be arrested, and so on.

The too close to home part didn't come clear until a few hours later. Apparently one of the associates downstairs is the wife of one of the men who testified against Nicols. Since he's still at large and there seems to be a theory that he might try and take revenge on this man (pretty damn stupid, I'd think) she's been escorted out by the police to collect her kid from the child care center next door, and we have police cars sitting out in the parking lot. Email from the Director of Property Services asked us all to watch for "anything out of the usual" and attempted to reassure us by saying she would not be back until he's caught. General speculation has given way to increasingly dramatic what-ifs and people nervous about going out to get their cars. I honestly think its going to wind up being a whole lot of nothing, but this is still rather more excitement that anyone wanted for a Friday - especially the poor woman who the police walked out of our doors to try and explain this to her child.