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Nikki: 'I had a right to protect my life'
Acquitted of all charges in the shooting death of her fianc, the former beauty queen gives her first post-trial interview
When her lawyer told her there was a verdict, Sharron Nicole "Nikki" Redmond was tucked behind a brown courthouse snack machine.
Her mother, brothers and grandmother as well as an extended family of aunts, cousins and friends kept her company and the media away.
Bible in hand, she walked into the Chatham County courtroom where for more than a week her trial on murder charges unfolded.
Her family walked with her as far as they could until she eased into the chair at the defendant's table for the last time.
She stood up again for the verdict. Deputies were there in case they had to handcuff her. Behind her, the benches were filled with people.
Not guilty.
After deliberating about nine hours, a jury of three men and nine women said Redmond is not a murderer for killing fianc Kevin Darnell Shorter in December 2003.
"Jesus, thank you," said her mom, Sharron Elaine Redmond.
Shorter's parents showed no reaction.
Neither did Shorter's other fiance, Rachel Hall.
Defense attorneys Michael Schiavone, Brian Daly and Steve Sparger hugged Nikki Redmond, Miss Savannah 2003.
Superior Court Judge Michael Karpf thanked jurors and excused them.
Elaine Redmond went to her only daughter and youngest child.
Holding each other, mother and daughter walked out of the courtroom, past the cameramen and through the back door.
Hours later, inside the dark crimson walls of her attorney's conference room on Bull Street, Nikki Redmond, dressed in a black suit, gave her first interview.
"I was created into a larger-than-life, obsessed beauty queen that had to have everything her way," she said. "To sit there and listen to things said that are not true is like sitting with your hands tied behind your back and having someone repeatedly spit in your face.
"In a month, maybe in 10 years, I'll just be another face that people pass and don't even know."
What she wants most now is to be her old self again.
The person she was before the shooting and the trial tested her.
"I stood fast," Redmond, 23, said.
Prison "was a grave and enormous possibility," she said. The former high-school teacher trembled as she spoke.
"I had a right to protect my life," she said.
The night she shot Shorter, Nikki Redmond had gone to Hall's house to talk to her about some harassing phone calls Hall, 24, had been getting.
Shorter, 25, a former Jenkins High School football standout, had accused Redmond of contacting the other woman in his life. Redmond wasn't making those calls and wanted to tell Hall so.
But the beauty queen didn't have Hall's number. So Redmond drove around Hall's Runaway Point neighborhood until she found her house.
The two women were talking cordially in the front yard when Shorter showed up.
The man who'd asked both women to marry him bolted from the car and came at Redmond - threatening to kill her, she testified Monday.
Ultimately, Redmond fired her .40-caliber pistol from the window of her white Mitsubishi Galant as she made her getaway. She thought he was reaching into his gray Monte Carlo for the gun she knew he carried. Her bullet struck him in the buttocks, severing his left femoral artery.
Redmond kept driving.
Didn't know she'd hit him.
She talked to police later that night - Tuesday, Dec. 16.
She told them she'd fired a warning shot; that she was afraid Shorter was going to kill her. She told them Shorter had hit her before, that he had been abusive over the course of their three-year relationship.
But she didn't tell detectives her lover had threatened her life that night.
The police told her then she'd wounded Shorter, but Redmond thought he'd recover.
Prosecutors told jurors Redmond's testimony that Shorter threatened her was a lie.
If that were true, prosecutors said, she would have told police that night.
At her attorney's office Wednesday, Redmond explained why she hadn't.
"I didn't think that Kevin was seriously hurt that night, and I didn't want him to get into trouble," she said.
Shorter died three days after Redmond shot him.
"I was in disbelief and in shock," she said. "I screamed out.
"I never got a chance to see him. I was never able to say goodbye."
She loved him even though she testified about the two black eyes he'd given her and the repeated slapping, kicking and choking episodes.
"I would hope that the experiences that happened to lead up to this case would be a red light to women that just because we are the weaker sex that that in no way means we have to let ourselves be weakened or torn down by someone of the opposite sex," she said.
Prosecutors had told jurors Redmond, a Spelman College honors graduate, was too smart to stick with an abusive boyfriend.
"Nobody is too smart to be an abused woman," Redmond said.
"Being abused is not something people like to admit to," she said, "and anyone is vulnerable."
Redmond hid it from her family and friends until Shorter's blows became bruises.
Now, she said, she's wiser.
She and her family said prayer got them through the ordeal.
Prosecutors said they were disappointed by the verdict.
Shorter's parents didn't want to talk about the verdict Wednesday.
After meeting with prosecutors in their sixth-floor office, the Shorters left the courthouse through a side door. Last week, after the jury was selected Monday, Phyllis and Daniel Shorter said while they had forgiven Redmond, they wanted justice for their son.
Nikki Redmond didn't know that.
She hasn't spoken to them since before the shooting.
But she and her mother still pray for the Shorters.
"I'm a mother," Elaine Redmond said. "They lost a child. There's no easy way around what happened.
"But justice has spoken."
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