Hostage recounts ordeal

ATLANTA – She trembled with fear before the armed man who was wanted in the shooting deaths of a judge and three others. But Ashley Smith kept her head, even when Brian Gene Nichols pushed into her home by sticking a gun in her ribs and bound her with masking tape, an extension cord and a curtain. “I didn’t want to die,” she said Sunday. “I didn’t want him to hurt anybody else.”

The 26-year-old woman, credited by police for bringing a massive manhunt for Nichols to a nonviolent end Saturday, resurfaced a day later with a harrowing account of the 71/2 hours she spent as Nichols’ hostage in the apartment she had moved into only two days before in an Atlanta suburb.

Captor and captive talked, and he untied her. He looked at her family photos, she read to him from the Bible and “The Purpose-Driven Life,” and cooked him a breakfast of pancakes and eggs.

” ‘Wow,’ he said, ‘real butter,’ ” she recalled in accounts aired by Atlanta-based CNN and posted on the Web site of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution.

Progressively, she gained the trust of the man who, at that time, was Georgia’s most wanted fugitive, with a $60,000 reward on his head in connection with the slayings. “I really didn’t want him to hurt himself, or anyone else to hurt him,” she said.

Watching TV news about the carnage being blamed on him, and the multi-agency law enforcement operation mounted to capture him, Nichols told her: “I cannot believe that’s me on there.”

“He needed hope for his life,” Smith said. “He said, ‘Look at my eyes, I’m already dead.’ I said, ‘You’re not dead. You’re standing right in front of me. If you want to die, you can. Its your choice.’ “

Police and the FBI were scouring Georgia and nearby states for the 33-year-old Nichols after he allegedly grabbed a sheriff’s deputy’s gun Friday morning at the Atlanta courthouse where he was being tried for rape, and fatally shot his judge, a court reporter and another deputy. He then fled, and according to police, shot dead an agent for U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement as the agent worked on his new home.

Nichols was arrested Saturday morning after Smith talked him into allowing her to leave her apartment in Duluth, northeast of Atlanta. She said she phoned 911 right after getting into her car.

Gwinnett County police responded with a SWAT team.

Smith’s former captor, who described himself at first to her as “a soldier,” offered no resistance to police and surrendered by waving a makeshift white flag. “If you don’t turn yourself in, lots more people are going to get hurt,” Smith said she told him. The woman with long blond bangs said Nichols called her “an angel,” and said God had led him to her door for her to tell him he had hurt a lot of people.

She asked him, she said, if he believed in miracles. “You got out of that courthouse with police everywhere, and you don’t think that’s a miracle?” Smith said. “You don’t think you’re supposed to be sitting right here in front of me. …Your miracle could be that you need to be caught for this. If you go to prison, then you need to share the word of God with all the prisoners there.”

Wielding a gun, Nichols had forced his way into the apartment about 2 a.m. Saturday, after Smith returned from buying cigarettes. She feared for her life, she said, and told the armed invader she had a 5-year-old daughter, who was not with her.

“My husband died four years ago, and I told (Nichols) that if he hurt me, my little girl wouldn’t have a mommy or a daddy, and she was expecting to see me the next morning and that if he didn’t let me go, she would be really upset,” she said.

About 5:30 a.m., she said, Nichols told her that he had to ditch the pickup he had taken from the slain federal agent, David Wilhelm. She followed him in her car, she said, because if she had refused, she might have been killed or someone else might have been hurt. She then drove him back to her apartment.

At 9:30 a.m., Smith said, Nichols let her leave to see her daughter. He offered to hang curtains in her new apartment while she was gone.

“I know he was probably hoping deep down that I was going to come back,” Smith said, “but I think he knew what I had to do, that I had to turn him in.” Before she left, she said, he asked her to visit him in jail.

Nichols was being held by U.S. authorities in an undisclosed location on a federal charge of possessing a firearm while under indictment. Officials in the office of Fulton County District Attorney Paul Howard said more serious charges in the shooting spree would be brought against Nichols within 30 days. An initial court appearance was expected sometime this week.

On a warm, sunny Sunday morning, with the dogwood trees in cottony bloom, a religious service was held in Decatur, outside Atlanta, for the shooting victims, and co-workers were invited to light candles in their memory. In addition to Wilhelm, those slain were Superior Court Judge Rowland Barnes, 64; court reporter Julie Ann Brandau, 43; and Fulton Sheriff’s Deputy Hoyt Teasley, 43.

Courthouse employees hugged each other and joined members at Covenant Ministries, a nondenominational Christian church, for a tearful service. “There is just a sadness all over the department,” said Wanaada Clark, a detention officer with the Fulton County Sheriff’s Department, who attended before reporting to her shift at the county jail. “Everyone is still trying to cope with it.”

Co-workers also lighted a candle for sheriff’s Deputy Cynthia Hall, 51, who was in critical condition and on a respirator at Grady Memorial Hospital. Although initial reports were that Nichols had allegedly shot her in the head after overpowering her and taking her gun at the courthouse, hospital officials said Sunday that it was now believed she either had been struck on the head with a gun or fell and hit her head.