An emergency room nurse on duty the night Diane McIver died of a gunshot wound testified Friday that she overheard a lawyer tell the woman's husband, Atlanta attorney Claud “Tex” McIver, “This is what you're going to tell them.”

“I had the impression there was a plan being enacted,” Emory University Hospital ER nurse Terri Sullivan said. Tex McIver, a woman wearing a cowboy hat she identified as family friend Dani Jo Carter and a man carrying a legal pad that prosecutors have identified as McIver's attorney, Stephen Maples, “were kind of huddling like … a sports team, kind of holding on in a small circle,” she said.

Sullivan is the fifth Emory ER nurse to testify at Tex McIver's ongoing murder trial. The lawyer, now retired from Atlanta's Fisher & Phillips, is charged with malice murder, felony murder and multiple counts of influencing witnesses stemming from Diane McIver's shooting on Sept. 25, 2016. She died hours after McIver shot her in the couple's SUV as Carter drove them home. McIver has always said the shooting was an accident.

McIver and his representatives have given multiple explanations about how the gun went off, including that McIver had apparently fallen asleep, that the gun discharged when the SUV hit a bump in the road, even though it was stopped at a traffic light, and that he just didn't remember.

Prosecutors claim he had a financial motive.

Sullivan testified Friday that Emory ER personnel, herself included, were suspicious of the circumstances surrounding the shooting, which allegedly occurred on Piedmont Avenue near 12th Street.

Sullivan said she was so concerned about what she overheard that she asked another nurse to keep tabs on the group “to see what she could hear either to corroborate what I had heard or to see further whether there was an inappropriate discussion going on.”

Sullivan said that, after Diane McIver died in the hospital early on Sept. 26, 2016, Tex McIver checked into the ER, complaining of an anxiety attack. Sullivan, who treated him, said Tex McIver did not appear dazed.

She described him as “calm and cooperative. … He was speaking in a very calm manner. He was not crying. There were no tears.”

McIver told her he needed “something to help me cope,” Sullivan said. His wife, he explained, “had died unexpectedly.”

In listing chronic medical conditions, McIver, she said, never mentioned he had a sleep disorder or that he occasionally suffered from amnesia. Within an hour of being triaged and seen by an ER physician, McIver was dismissed with one tablet of Ativan, an anti-anxiety drug, and four tabs of Xanax.

But, while Diane McIver was being treated, ER personnel were already comparing her husband to O.J. Simpson—who was charged and later acquitted of murder in a sensational trial in the mid-1990s for the death of his wife, Nicole, and a male friend.

“We were all just feeling such a sense of shock,” Sullivan said. “Some of us were angry that clearly someone had shot her and clearly it was an unfair situation.”

“People were talking about it because … he was a high-profile person with a lot of money,” Sullivan testified

Sullivan also confirmed she told prosecutors “Nobody with a gunshot would ever come to Emory.” Emory is not a trauma center and would divert ambulances with gunshot victims either to Grady Memorial Hospital or Atlanta Medical Center in downtown Atlanta, she added.

Both hospitals were closer to the street near Piedmont Park where Diane McIver was shot than Emory, where Tex McIver directed Carter to take his wife.

“I thought it was suspicious that a gunshot would come to Emory, yes,” Sullivan said. “When I saw the group huddled around, [and heard] 'This is what you're going to tell them,' then I started to be suspicious there was significant foul play … that there was something amiss.”