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Aug 25, 8:08 AM (ET)
By JON SARCHE and CHASE SQUIRES

BOULDER, Colo. (AP) - John Mark Karr's brother insisted Friday that Karr did not kill JonBenet Ramsey. "Absolutely not. Emphatically. Without a doubt," Nate Karr said in a television interview.

Karr told ABC's "Good Morning America" he was certain his brother spent Christmas 1996, when JonBenet was slain, with his family.

"Well I can say almost without question that from the time that John had children he has never missed a Christmas with his family, and that's any Christmas," said Karr, who appeared on the show with his father, Wexford Karr.

"If he was away from his family during Christmas it would have been a family scandal," Nate Karr said.

The brother said he was uncertain where the family spent the holiday when the 6-year-old child beauty queen was slain in her Boulder, Colo., home.

"To the best of our recollection, he was either with us in Atlanta or with (his ex-wife) Lara," Nate Karr said. "It's not as easy as you might think to remember 10 years ago."

Addressing his brother, Nate Karr said: "We love you and we support you 100 percent. ... Help's on the way."

John Mark Karr, meanwhile, spent his first night in an 8-by-10-foot jail cell in Colorado, away from other inmates for his own safety.

Nine days after his arrest in Thailand, the 41-year-old former schoolteacher now awaits a court appearance that could come as early as next week.

Karr arrived in Colorado Thursday, flying in from Los Angeles on a state police plane to face charges in a homicide case prosecutors acknowledged is in its infancy.

Formal charges were pending and the date of Karr's first court appearance could be announced Friday, the district attorney's office said.

His first few hours at the jail were to include physical and mental evaluations, and he was isolated from the other 480 inmates, Boulder County Sheriff Joe Pelle said.

"Anybody that's in jail in our population that faces these kinds of charges, charges against children, faces some danger," Pelle said.

Questions about Karr's involvement in the case have arisen since he told reporters following his arrest in Thailand that he was with JonBenet at the time of her death but that it was an accident.

Boulder County prosecutors have refused to detail any evidence they might have, but in a court filing this week said investigators didn't learn of Karr's name until Aug. 11, five days before his arrest. They said he was arrested in part because they feared he might get tipped off and vanish.

The court filing conflicts with the Sonoma County, Calif., sheriff, who said his office alerted Boulder authorities about Karr in 2001 after he was arrested on child pornography charges. The sheriff and Boulder prosecutors declined to comment on the apparent discrepancy.

Karr has professed love for JonBenet in e-mails with a Colorado professor, and told a California woman he believes the girl was tortured before she was strangled.

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Nate Karr told ABC his brother may have become obsessed with the case because he wanted to write a book about it. Because he lost the ability to see his sons and wife five years ago, "maybe he felt lost," the brother said. "And maybe that was the only reality he had left."

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Associated Press writers Kim Nguyen, Catherine Tsai and Don Mitchell in Boulder; Colleen Slevin and Dan Elliott in Denver; Gillian Flaccus in Long Beach, Calif.; Marcus Wohlsen in San Francisco; Jordan Robertson in San Jose, Calif.; Harry R. Weber in Atlanta; and Linda Deutsch in Los Angeles contributed to this report.