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The Omega Letter Intelligence Digest
Vol: 42 Issue: 14 - Monday, March 14, 2005--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Angel and the Badman
When maniac fugitive Mark Nichols took Ashley Smith hostage, he had already killed four people and was prepared to kill more.
Gallons of blood had been shed for his twenty-six hours of freedom, and he had decided that he was a dead man walking. He had nothing more to lose.
Seven hours later, Nichols surrendered to police peacefully, thanks to Ashley Smith, a woman Nichols now calls 'an angel'.
The 26-year-old woman was credited by police for bringing a massive manhunt for Nichols to a non-violent end Saturday. Her account of the 7 1/2 hours she spent as Nichols' hostage in the apartment she had moved into only two days before is nothing short of awe-inspiring.
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.
Wielding the 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 injured. 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.
Assessment:
Smith is the granddaughter of a former Marine and headmaster at the August Christian School and she is a member of the Hebron Baptist Church.
At twenty-six, she was already a widow -- her husband died in her arms, the victim of an as-yet unsolved homicide.
The murder of her husband eventually convinced Smith that, in order to move on, she had to accept that God had a plan for her life.
That plan, she and family members told the press Sunday night, brought Nichols to the door of a woman who could always see a flicker of promise in someone else. "An angel," Smith said Nichols called her.
What turned Mark Nichols from a crazed murderer about to take another life into the man who offered to hang curtains for her in her new apartment?
"I asked why he chose me and why he chose Bridgewater apartments, and he said he didn’t know, just randomly," she said. "But after we began to talk he said he thought that I was an angel sent from God... to tell him that he had hurt a lot of people and the families of people, to let him know how they felt, because I had gone through it myself.
"He didn’t want to hurt anyone else. He told me he just wanted a place to sit down, to relax, to watch TV, to eat some real food," she said.
While Nichols looked at her family photos, Smith read to him from her Bible and cooked him a plate of pancakes and eggs.
("Wow, real butter," Smith said Nichols exclaimed over breakfast.)
Smith talked to Nichols about the purpose of HIS life and introduced him to Jesus. She told him that God had a purpose for his life, and that his purpose was to take the Message she had given him into prison with him.
"I feel like I met him for a reason," Smith said of Nichols. "If that was for myself not to get killed, or any other police officers not to, or for him to save hundreds of other people in prison, my purpose was fulfilled."
Such is the Power of Christ -- the Redeemer Whom we worship. At one moment, Nichols was a crazed murderer with more murder on his mind.
Seven hours later, he was ready to go to prison where he could share Christ, and, in Smith's words, possibly "save hundreds of other people in prison."
There IS Power in the Blood.
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