Sitting in a jail cell on a murder charge, Dontae Nicholas took up writing in a journal.
He wrote that voices were telling him to put a plastic bag over another inmate?s head until the man passed out, to stab one guard with a pen and bite off another one?s nose. Nicholas was starting to dream about doing harm, he wrote. “I hope everybody?s ready, because itwon?t be pretty.”
A Baltimore County prosecutor read aloud handwritten passages from Nicholas? journal Tuesday as the 25-year-old man pleaded guilty to shooting Montrell Williams dead at an October 2005 gathering of friends.
Judge Judith Ensor sided with the prosecution, finding that Nicholas was chronically violent, and sentenced him to the maximum 30 years in prison. Reading a different passage from Nicholas? journal, Ensor described how he debated hurting someone in jail. It was almost Saturday, and he didn?t want to be punished and miss an upcoming visit with his family, he wrote.
“Clearly a calculating individual, clearly most concerned with his own interests,” Ensor said.
Nicholas was drunk and high on ecstasy the night he walked out of a party in the unit block of Dowling Circle, grabbed a sawed-off shotgun, came back and fatally shot Williams, according to court documents and testimony.
Williams? mother described her son as a “gifted and talented young man” who loved drawing charcoal portraits and planned on a career in criminal justice.
“My child was a likeable person,” Linda Goodwin said, leaving the courtroom, adding she was pleased with the sentence.
“I?ve already forgiven him,” her sister Barbara Goodwin said of Nicholas. “I?m glad he did own up to what he did.”
Speaking to the court before receiving his sentence, Nicholas apologized to Williams? family and said he was suicidal when he wrote the journal entries.
“I didn?t want to face today,” Nicholas told Ensor. “I did not mean for this mistake to happen.”
“It?s not a mistake,” she said.
“This tragedy,” he corrected himself.
“There you go.”
