A look at gang life at hearing

Confession cites requirement to kill

If Calvin Nicholson wanted into the Bloods gang, he'd have to lean out of the car's back seat window and fire at "Tide," a youth he thought to be a Crip.

Nicholson did fire a pistol that day in November, he told police. And the next day, when one of his fellow shooters called to congratulate Nicholson on their successful killing, Nicholson hung up the phone and started crying, he said in a written confession made public at a hearing Thursday.

"The reason I shot the gun at 'Tide' was I thought I wanted to join the gang," Nicholson told a detective. "When I realized I didn't, it was [too] late."

It was the most detailed statement yet made public in the Nov. 5 drive-by slaying of Todd Antonio Douglas, an 18-year-old Hillside High School student. Nicholson's attorney, Robert Harris, was asking a judge to lower his client's $250,000 bail. But by the time Assistant District Attorney Tracey Cline finished telling the judge about the state's case against Nicholson, which included liberal mention of his confession, the judge seemed unwilling to make it easier for the teen to get out of jail.

"Mr. Harris, based on what I've heard so far, why are we here?" Superior Court Judge Ronald Stephens asked.

Harris told the judge that the statement, which is signed on every page by Nicholson, is not what his client told police.

Stephens denied the request for a lower bail.

Douglas' mother, Sheryl Smith wore a white T-shirt bearing a large picture of her son. It has been part of her uniform in her ongoing effort to make sure public officials remember her son and what led to his death.

When the hearing was over, someone made a comment that led to friction between the families of Nicholson and Douglas.

"Don't be threatening him, because he did not do it," said Mildred Nicholson, the defendant's mother. The statement, which brought the court proceedings to a halt and alerted security, was apparently a response to something said by a relative of Douglas.

"Nobody kills my cousin and gets away with it," said a member of that family as sheriff's deputies escorted them out.

Also charged in the case is Justin Hatch of Grandview Drive. In his confession dictated to a detective days after the homicide, Nicholson, a 17-year-old ninth-grader, implicates at least six others involved in the drive-by.

Nicholson said he thought that Douglas was a member of the Crips gang -- Douglas often wore blue, the color favored by the gang's members.

In the week before the killing, Cline said, scuffles had flared up between Douglas and his friends and those who were later implicated in the killing. Nicholson told police that on Nov. 5 he and a handful of friends, many of whom were members of the Bloods gang, were hanging out at The Streets at Southpoint mall and got some fast food. At the restaurant, one of the group said something "about getting Tide," a reference to Douglas.

Nicholson had earlier been told that if he wanted into the gang, "You got to put in work."

This was it. He was given a gun and seated in the back seat of one of two vehicles involved, according to the statement. On Bacon Street, the cars caught up with Douglas and another man, both of whom shot back, Nicholson said in the statement.

When the shooting was over, Nicholson told police that Hatch told him to "keep my mouth shut or he would kill my family."

"I prayed to the Lord and asked for him to have his angels watch over me, for me not to get caught and for him to forgive me," Nicholson said in the statement.