SIKESTON MAN FACES MURDER TRIAL SECOND TIME

JACKSON, Mo. -- For the second time in three months, 20-year-old Darius Nicholson is on trial for murder.

A new trial for Nicholson, of Columbia, Mo., began Monday after his first trial in June resulted in a hung jury.

Nicholson is charged with first-degree murder in the 1998 shooting death of a gas station attendant in Sikeston, Mo., during a robbery. He is also charged with felonies of robbery and armed criminal action.

Robbers stole about $200 from the cash register of the former Kellett Oil Co. before shooting 31-year-old Charles Garrett in the head with a .22-caliber revolver, police said.

Nicholson's involvement in the robbery was first mentioned after two men were arrested for a similar gas station robbery in Cape Girardeau, said Mel-vin Teer, special prosecutor for the attorney general's office. After a Sikeston police detective questioned the two, they explained their idea of an armed robbery came from Michael Hatcher and Nicholson, Teer said in his opening statement to jurors on Monday.

Public defender Kent Hall, Nicholson's attorney, told the jury his client would play basketball and socialize with those involved in the robberies, and he knew them as acquaintances, but he did not rob a gas station with them.

"He could not be guilty," Hall told jurors. "He was in another part of the county, nowhere near that gas station when the robbery occurred."

Hall maintains Nicholson was staying with his girlfriend at the time of the robbery.

Nicholson was named as an accomplice by Hatcher, who received 10 years in prison for robbery after agreeing to testify against Nicholson and two other men.

In a trial last month in Benton, Mo., the two men who were said to have participated in the robbery were found innocent of second-degree murder, but guilty of robbery. Michael Bell of Sikeston and Orlandis Farr of Malden, Mo., will be sentenced Oct. 6.

Nicholson, who attended school in Sikeston, had traveled to visit his grandmother along with his five sisters at the time of the robbery.

His girlfriend was almost at the end of a full-term pregnancy with their second child during Nicholson's visit, Hall said.

On the evening of June 5, 1998, Nicholson had played basketball at a park before going to his grandmother's house. He left his grandmother's some time before midnight to walk to see his girlfriend, a student at the University of Missouri-Columbia who was staying with her mother, Hall said.

Although he was picked up by friends who were out driving, they had already dropped off Nicholson to see his girlfriend by the time the robbery occurred, shortly before 3 a.m. on June 6, 1998, Hall said.

The trial, expected to last three days, had been moved to Cape Girardeau County on a change of venue request.