Even for a building where visitors have to pass through a metal detector to get in, security appeared abnormally high Tuesday morning at the Forsyth County Hall of Justice.
Deputy sheriffs who might ordinarily smile or chat were stone-faced and serious. Close to a dozen stood in a courtroom where there might be two or three on a normal day. Elevators normally used by court personnel — prosecutors, judges and police officers — were sealed for a short time.
The reason for such measures became clear shortly after 10 a.m. when a slip of a young man named Mikal Deen Mahdi jangled into Courtroom 5A in an oversized orange jumpsuit and heavy shackles.
Mahdi, 28, had been brought to Forsyth County from South Carolina's death row at great trouble and expense for a brief court hearing in which he would mumble his way through a guilty plea for killing a store clerk 7½ years ago.
For two figures in the courtroom, this day couldn't have come soon enough.
'Totally devastated'
Many times in these kinds of proceedings, victims' family members make their way to the witness stand to tell the sentencing judge something of their loss.
Not so Tuesday.
Nancy Brown, the mother of slain clerk Christopher Jason Boggs, sat quietly in the second row, rocking slightly and clutching a damp tissue.
At times during the mandatory, by-the-book recitation of the facts, she placed her head on her husband's shoulder and closed her eyes. She gasped and winced when a police detective described how her son died behind the counter of a Broad Street gas station/convenience store on July 15, 2004.
Instead of addressing the court, Brown allowed prosecutor Jennifer Martin to speak on the record for her and her son. Boggs was a graduate of the University of North Carolina at Greensboro who hoped to break into filmmaking, Martin said. He was a kind man who would make sure any leftover food in the store went to the homeless men who tended to congregate outside.
"The family is totally devastated," Martin said.
Mahdi, meanwhile, showed little visible emotion — hardly surprising considering what he did to land in the defendant's chair. After killing Boggs, Mahdi launched into a multistate crime rampage that culminated in the murder of an off-duty sheriff's deputy in central South Carolina that landed him a richly deserved spot on death row.
Overkill?
Getting Mahdi to Winston-Salem was no easy trick. State officials in South Carolina were hesitant to let him leave the state, even under heavy guard and for less than a day, to plead guilty to killing Boggs.
No fewer than 11 deputies from the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office made the trip to Kirkland Correctional Institution in Columbia, S.C. — including a heavily armed special response team to collect Mahdi.
In terms of dollars and cents, Chief Deputy Brad Stanley of the Forsyth County Sheriff's Office spent perhaps $2,000 extra on moving Mahdi. The state paid untold more in court costs for prosecutors, defense attorneys and other court personnel.
In some ways, it would seem to be overkill to send nearly a dozen men on a 14-hour trip just so a man — who will in all likelihood die on a gurney in a S.C. state prison at an hour and a day of a court's choosing — could be given a meaningless life sentence here.
But to the Browns, Tuesday was about one thing: holding a murderer accountable.
"I would like to say justice is being done," Nancy Brown said afterward. "And I'd like to thank everybody for this day."
No price tag can be placed on justice or accountability, no matter how long in the making.
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