posted March 14, 2005 04:44 PM         

About 2 a.m. Saturday, the 26-year-old runs out of cigarettes and heads to a local convenience store to buy a pack.

When she returns, she sees a man in a truck waiting outside her door. She had seen the man earlier, but didn't think much of it.

She gets out of her car and shuts the door.

She hears the truck door close about the same time. Fear rises in her.

Holding her key in her hand, she makes her way to her front door. As she slides her key into the lock, she turns to see the man from the truck. She screams. He pokes a gun into her ribs.

"Stop screaming," he demands. "I won't hurt you if you stop screaming."

She fears the worst — that she will be raped and killed.

"Do you know who I am?" he asks.

He is wearing a dark blazer beneath a red ski parka but no shirt. He has a new University of Georgia cap on his head.

She doesn't know him.

He removes the cap, showing his shaved head.

"Now do you know who I am?" he asks again.

She recognizes him: Brian G. Nichols. She begins to tremble.

"I won't hurt you," he tells her.

He takes her into the bathroom, places her in the tub and sits on a small seat, holding a gun.

He leaves her to check for others in the apartment. When he returns, he tries again to reassure her.

"I don't want to hurt anyone else," he says. Worried that her screams could bring too much attention, he warns her.

"If you scream, the police will come. There will be a hostage situation," he says. "I'll have to kill you and kill myself."

He binds her with masking tape and carries her into the bedroom, where he restrains her with more tape, an electrical cord and some curtains. He makes no sexual advance.

"I just need to relax," he tells her.

He needs a shower and leads her as she hops back to the bathroom. He sits her on the chair and drapes a towel over her head for modesty. He places his guns on the counter and showers.

Afterward she finds him some fresh clothes — a T-shirt and trousers — and he seems to be calmer.

He unbinds her and they sit in her living room.

"I've had a really long day," he says.

He offers her some faint explanation — maybe his first to account for how he had spent this long day.

"I feel like I'm a warrior — that people of my color have gone through a lot."

But he says he's had enough. "I don't want to hurt anybody anymore," he tells her. "I don't want to kill anybody.

"I want to rest."

The tenor of the moment becomes more normal, as normal as it could be.

Smith asks if he would mind if she reads.

Nichols says OK. She gets the book she'd been reading, "The Purpose Driven Life." It is a book that offers daily guidance. She picks up where she left off — the first paragraph of the 33rd chapter.

"We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige and position. If you can demand service from others you've arrived. In our self serving culture with its me first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept."

He stops her and asks her to read the passage again.

They talk and lose track of time. They look at her family photos. "Who's this?" he asks, pointing to a picture. "Who's this?"

She talks about her family. Her husband died in her arms four years ago after he had been stabbed in a knife fight in Augusta, her hometown. She has a 5-year-old daughter.

She asks him not to kill her because that would leave her daughter without a mother or a father.

She tells him she is supposed to meet her daughter Saturday morning about 10 a.m. She hadn't seen her in two weeks. "She's expecting to see me," she tells him. "She's already been through a lot in her life."

Smith shows Nichols her husband's autopsy report.

"That's what a lot of people will have to go through now, because of what you've done," she tells him. "You need to turn yourself in. No one else needs to die and you're going to die if you don't."

Smith asks Nichols how he feels about what he did. She asks him to think of the families of the victims.

She senses a change. "He wasn't a warrior anymore," she recalled later.

"You can go in there right now, pick up that gun and kill me," he tells her. "I'd rather you do it than the police."

He talks about his mother, who is in Africa on business, and wonders what she must be thinking about her son.

They sit watching the TV news of the shooting spree. The screen fills with the story of his attack on Cynthia Hall, the 51-year-old deputy he had overpowered Friday morning to begin his rampage.

"I didn't shoot her," Nichols interjects. "I hit her really hard. Lord, I'm sorry. . . . I hope she lives."

He sees himself on the broadcast. "I can't believe that's me," he says.

Nichols later pulls out the badge and driver's license of David Wilhelm, the U.S. customs agent whom he is accused of killing hours before. He hands them to Smith.

Smith looks at the license and tells Nichols that Wilhelm was 40 years old. "He probably has a wife and kids," she says.

"I didn't want to kill him," Nichols says. "He wouldn't do what I asked him to do. He fought me, so I had to kill him."

As the night wears on, Smith begins to feel her chances improve.

Nichols tells her he will let her go to see her daughter later in the morning.

Around 6:15 a.m., Nichols says that before sunrise he needs to move the truck he had stolen from Wilhelm.

Smith agrees to follow him in her car. He leaves the guns under her bed.

As they drive, Smith thinks about calling 911 on her cellphone, but she decides against it. She fears police will come and surround them. There'd be a shootout.

Nichols ditches the truck, about two miles from the apartment complex.

"Wow, you didn't drive off," Nichols says as he gets into her car. "I thought you were going to."

She drives him back to her apartment. She no longer doubts that she will be set free.

Back at the apartment, Nichols is hungry. She cooks him eggs and pancakes, gives him fruit juice. They have breakfast together.

Nichols asks when she needs to see her daughter. At 10:00 a.m., Smith responds. It'd be good if she could leave at 9:30 to get there.

Smith washes the dishes and gets ready to leave.

Nichols asks her to come visit him in jail. "You're an angel sent from God to me," he tells her. "I want to talk to you again. Will you come see me?"

She tells him she will.

"I'll be back in a little while," she says as she prepares to leave.

Nichols gives her an odd look that leads Smith to doubt whether he believes her.

At the door, he hands her $40. Smith says she doesn't need it.

"Take it," Nichols says. "I don't have any need for it."

Nichols holds a tool from Wilhelm's truck and asks if he can hang some pictures or some curtains.

Smith tells him to do whatever he likes.

As she walks out of the apartment in the bright, warm daylight, Smith begins to shake all over. She drives to a stop sign and dials 911. She tells the dispatcher that Nichols is in her apartment.

Within minutes, a police SWAT team swarms outside Smith's apartment. Nichols holds out a white piece of cloth and surrenders.

Sunday night, after recounting her time with Nichols, Smith says she has found some purpose to his finding her.

"I believe God brought him to my door so he couldn't hurt anyone else," she says.

Hostage reads 'Purpose-Driven Life' to alleged Atlanta courthouse killer
Mar 14, 2005
By Erin Curry
ATLANTA (BP)--Ashley Smith, the Atlanta-area woman taken hostage by the subject of the largest manhunt in Georgia history March 12, calmed the alleged killer by reading an excerpt from "The Purpose-Driven Life" and talking with him about God. She escaped by persuading him to let her pick up her daughter from an AWANA children's program at a Southern Baptist church.

"I asked him if I could read," Smith, 26, said in recounting the ordeal to reporters outside her attorney's office March 13. "He said, 'What do you want to read?'

"'Well, I have a book in my room.' So I went and got it. I got my Bible, and I got a book called 'The Purpose-Driven Life.' I turned it to the chapter that I was on that day. It was chapter 33. And I started to read the first paragraph of it. After I read it, he said, 'Stop. Will you read it again?'

"So I read it again to him," Smith said.

On Day 33 of the book, author Rick Warren, a Southern Baptist pastor in California, writes, "We serve God by serving others. The world defines greatness in terms of power, possessions, prestige, and position. If you can demand service from others, you've arrived. In our self-serving culture with its me-first mentality, acting like a servant is not a popular concept."

The alleged gunman, Brian Nichols, overpowered an Atlanta courthouse deputy as he was being escorted to court for a rape trial March 11. He then shot and killed the presiding judge and a court reporter before killing another deputy as he left the courthouse. Later he killed a federal agent in an attempt to flee authorities.

Nichols, 33, held Smith at gunpoint outside her Duluth apartment around 2:30 a.m. March 12, apparently having chosen her at random as she returned from a trip to a nearby store. Once he removed his hat, she recognized him as the man wanted for the killing spree and chose to cooperate with his demands. He tied her up and then began to converse with her.

Smith asked Nichols not to kill her because she was scheduled to pick up her 5-year-old daughter the next morning. Four years ago, Smith's husband died in her arms after being stabbed in a knife fight, according to The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and Smith was concerned that her daughter would become an orphan.

M. Allen Hughes, administrative pastor at Hebron Baptist Church in Dacula, Ga., told Baptist Press he was under the impression Smith planned to pick up her daughter at the church's AWANA function Saturday morning.

"My understanding was that her little girl was participating and that she was supposed to come pick up her little girl and obviously didn't get to do that because of the situation," Hughes said. "Some relative picked up the little girl for her, and ... when the relative found out that she did not pick the little girl up, that's how they knew something was going on. That's pretty much all we know on this end."

As time passed during the early morning hours at the apartment, Nichols and Smith talked about God, family and life experiences while the fugitive apparently became more comfortable with the hostage. She began to help the gunman consider the families of the victims he had shot that day and asked him if he thought about how they might be feeling.

"After we began to talk, he said he thought that I was an angel sent from God and that I was his sister and he was my brother in Christ and that he was lost and God led him right to me to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people," Smith told reporters. "And the families -- the people -- to let him know how they felt because I had gone through it myself."

Nichols held photographs of Smith's family in his hands and said repeatedly that he did not want to hurt anyone else, according to a CNN transcript of Smith's statements to reporters.

"He said, 'Can I stay here for a few days? I just want to eat some real food and watch some TV and sleep and just do normal things that normal people do,'" Smith said.

As they continued to talk, Nichols mentioned that he considered his life to be over.

"He needed hope for his life. He told me that he was already dead," Smith told reporters. "He said, 'Look at me. Look at my eyes. I am already dead.' And I said, 'You are not dead. You are standing right in front of me. If you want to die, you can. It's your choice.'

"But after I started to read to him, he saw -- I guess he saw my faith and what I really believed in. And I told him I was a child of God and that I wanted to do God's will. I guess he began to want to. That's what I think," she said.

When he was hungry, Smith made pancakes for Nichols and they talked more about God.

"I said, 'Do you believe in miracles? Because if you don't believe in miracles -- you are here for a reason. You're here in my apartment for some reason. You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere, and you don't think that's a miracle? You don't think you're supposed to be sitting right here in front of me listening to me tell you, you know, your reason here?'

"I said, 'You know, your miracle could be that you need to -- you need to be caught for this,'" Smith continued. "'You need to go to prison and you need to share the Word of God with them, with all the prisoners there.'"

By 9:30 a.m., Nichols agreed to let Smith leave to pick up her daughter. When she reached the first stop sign on her route, Smith dialed 911 and within minutes a Gwinnett County police SWAT team had surrounded the apartment with Nichols inside, according to The Journal-Constitution. Nichols waved a white piece of cloth to signal his surrender and was taken into custody.

"I believe God brought him to my door so he couldn't hurt anyone else," Smith said.

'I believe God brought him to my door'

posted March 14, 2005 04:54 PM         

I guess he was just a metaphor for what is happening to a lot o us - we are losing our way, mixing up our priorities and hurting others along the way. It is heart warming to see what a little faith and love can do to save a person.

Keep up the good work, Knowflakes, we are needed more than we know!

Love and Hugs

posted March 14, 2005 09:18 PM         

Amazing story