A 21-year-old North Little Rock man linked to a series of armed robberies that left one person partially blind and another with a gunshot wound had his bail set at $200,000 Tuesday after prosecutors described him as "out of control" and displaying "escalating" levels of violence.
Curtez Lacurt Nichouls is known to police as an "outspoken" member of a faction of the Crips street gang who is on probation for threatening his brother with a knife in July 2018, deputy prosecutor Whitney Ohlhausen told Circuit Judge Cathi Compton at Tuesday's bond hearing.
In setting his bail, the judge further ordered that, if Nichouls is released, he will be under a 24-hour curfew and must live with his mother in Sherwood.
Nichouls remained behind bars Wednesday.
Nichouls assaulted another inmate during his jail stay last year before he was mistakenly released last summer, the prosecutor told the judge. A warrant was issued for his arrest in June, but Nichouls remained at large until he was arrested Jan. 17 in Little Rock, according to authorities.
Ohlhausen said Nichouls had shot a man during a holdup the day before and that police had to chase Nichouls down to arrest him, pursuing him after he jumped out of a window and broke into a stranger's home to try and escape.
Nichouls did not testify, although he interrupted the prosecutor to deny shooting the man. Ohlhausen's summation of the allegations against him appeared to astonish the father of two.
"I'm a menace to society, bro? That's crazy," he exclaimed after she finished summing up for the judge.
Nichouls is charged with residential burglary, theft, two counts of first-degree battery and three counts of aggravated robbery, charges that together carry a potential life sentence, but defense attorney Colleen Kordsmeier disputed the prosecution's assertion that Nichouls is exceedingly violent and questioned whether the evidence against him in the shooting would stand up in court.
The public defender told the judge that the victim, 53-year-old Lorenzo Prado, cannot identify Nichouls as the masked armed robber who shot him and does not want to have to go to court to testify. Kordsmeier said a key witness who helped tie Nichouls to the shooting is a former girlfriend with "credibility" problems.
In the other two robberies, including the one that cost a pizza deliveryman his eye, the evidence shows that a co-defendant was the gun-wielding aggressor who pistol-whipped that victim, Kordsmeier said. The most that prosecutors can hope to prove is that Nichouls was a passive go-along who did what he was told to do, she said.
According to Kordsmeier, 19-year-old Deonte Lavell Goodloe of North Little Rock wielded the gun in two December 2019 robberies in North Little Rock with Nichouls -- the Dec. 9 holdup of UPS driver Braylin Steplight who had $120 taken from him and the Dec. 14 attack on pizza deliveryman Wesley York, who was pistol-whipped so severely he lost his left eye. York had about $15 on him, authorities said. Goodloe's twin brother, Devonte Laquan Goodloe, and an unnamed juvenile, are also charged in that attack.
Prado was shot in the left leg in the laundry room of the Mabelvale Rose Apartments at 7414 Mabelvale Pike on Jan. 16. According to police reports, bystanders saw a masked man threatening Prado with a gun and yelled at him to stop. The robber fired shots into the air, then turned back to demand Prado's money and shot him.
The gunman fled without taking anything. Police reported developing Nichouls, who did not live at the apartments, as a suspect in the case and found him the next day at the apartments. They reported chasing Nichouls through the complex and into a resident's apartment.
Nichouls was 19 in July 2018 when he was arrested after trying to stab his brother, Christopher Markese Nichouls, who is 20, and punching him during a fight at the family home in Little Rock.
Curtez Nichouls pleaded guilty to aggravated assault on a family member and misdemeanor domestic battering in February 2019 in exchange for a sentence of four months in jail and five years on probation, court records show.