Troubled Past May Have Prepared Hostage

Ashley Smith’s life took a sharp left turn when she hit adolescence.

She spent Friday nights with a group of friends so wild that her grandparents, devout evangelical Christians, prayed for her every Friday afternoon. She fell in love with a tough boy. She seemed drawn to trouble -- and troubled people -- by her sweet nature.

Last week, in a one-bedroom apartment north of Atlanta, Smith says she spent a strange, amazing night talking to Brian Gene Nichols, an accused rapist. Police said Nichols took her hostage after he overcame a guard and killed three people at the Fulton County Courthouse and then fatally shot a customs agent hours later. By 9 a.m., authorities said, she had convinced him to surrender, ending an intense search that had paralyzed the city.

Since then, the world has come calling for this 26-year-old waitress, a woman who struggled with alcohol addiction and voluntarily gave up custody of her daughter because she couldn’t provide her a stable home. Television producers have fought over the rights to an exclusive interview, ghost writers have dropped off letters of introduction, and Hollywood producers have pitched feature treatments of Smith’s ordeal. As for Smith, she has relaxed into the embrace of her family, who say they always knew she would find her way back.

“This has brought her back into the fold,” said Larry Croft, 49, her former stepfather. “She’s not lost. She has proved it to the world. This has put an exclamation mark on what her character is all about.”

Born as her parents’ marriage was disintegrating, Elizabeth Ashley Copeland spent her early years in the conservative home of her grandparents. Richard Machovec, a retired Marine, was headmaster of Augusta Christian School, where teachers measured skirts with rulers to make sure they weren’t too short.

Ashley was 11 when she moved in with her mother and Croft, and so quiet that they sometimes worried that she spent too much time reading the Bible. Over the next few years, though, that changed. She became a star point guard on the basketball team and transferred to public school.

“All of a sudden, she started getting attention -- attention from the wrong people,” Croft said. In 1996, she pleaded guilty to shoplifting charges and was sentenced to a year’s probation.

Around that time, she fell hard for Daniel McFarland Smith, a short, handsome man two years her senior. Mack, as he was known, had been arrested on accusations of battery, trespassing, possession of marijuana with intent to distribute, and, in one case, smashing a woman’s windshield with a pipe.

“He kind of had that bad-guy image,” Croft said. “The very first time she saw him she said, ‘I’m going to marry him.’ ”

In their crowd, it wasn’t unusual for 30 people to pile up in a parking lot brawl, but hard feelings usually melted away by the end of the weekend, said Patrick Weddle, 30, who once pressed battery charges against Mack after a fight. On Friday nights, they would climb with friends into a limousine and cruise the streets of Augusta, a city of about 200,000, and its wealthier suburbs across the county line.

“There was a lot of drugs, a lot of alcohol, a lot of sex,” said Terri Gandy, 27, a friend of Mack’s during that period. “I don’t like Augusta. I call it a black hole. It sucks the life out of people. You have rich kids whose parents buy them whatever they want, and they make a name for themselves selling drugs. I graduated and got out of town as quick as I possibly could.”

Not Ashley; although she could have left town on a basketball scholarship, she didn’t want to leave, Machovec said. She enrolled in college but dropped out after the first quarter. She got pregnant, and she and Mack decided to marry.

After their daughter, Morgan Paige, was born, Mack and Ashley didn’t go out as much. Croft said he nudged her to break away from the old crowd.

But the couple’s fresh start ended Aug. 18, 2001. Police don’t know exactly what sparked the violence that night, but there were rumors circulating that Mack had become a police informant, and Ashley’s family said the couple received an accusatory late-night phone call.

“She was begging him not to go over there, but he said, ‘I’ve got to defend my reputation,’ ” Croft said.

The Smiths arrived at Applecross Apartments, with friends, at about 3:30 in the morning, said Capt. Steve Morris of the Columbia County Sheriff’s Department. Within minutes, they were involved in a brawl with 10 to 15 people, who fought with “sticks, baseball bats, pipes, broken beer bottles, knives, barbecue grills,” Morris said.

By 3:39, when police arrived, Mack had been stabbed twice, once in the heart. He died in his wife’s arms in the back of a pickup truck.

Mack’s death sent Ashley on a long slide. “She went back to Mack’s friends,” said Machovec, 74. “After that it wasn’t a Friday-night thing anymore.”

She was arrested on drunk driving charges in 2001 and again in 2002 because of a suspended license. In 2003, she was arrested on a charge of violating probation and again on a charge of battery -- a charge that was later dropped -- against Croft. That summer, she signed a court order transferring custody of her 4-year-old daughter to Kim Rogers, her aunt.

At that point, Smith began to straighten out. She checked in for a six-month stay at Bridges of Hope, a Christian rehabilitation center where clients rise at 5:45 a.m. and spend days working in the forest, raking pine straw that’s sold for landscaping, said Randy Sellers, the program’s executive director. “When she came in here, she had a little hope, but she didn’t have any faith,” Sellers said. “Ashley was willing. She had reached a point in her life when she wanted something different.”

Her move to Atlanta last year marked the beginning of a new, hopeful phase. Two months ago, Ashley wrote an earnest letter to the judge in her daughter’s custody case describing her efforts to create a stable home for Paige. She told him her achievements: a part-time job at a clothing store in the Gwinnett Place Mall, a medical assistant training course at Georgia Medical Institute.

“My life was miserable after my husband died until recently,” she wrote. “I do not use his death as an excuse anymore.”

Ashley spent last weekend moving her possessions to a new apartment. She moved alone, with a mattress strapped to the top of her car, an effect she laughingly compared to the television show “Sanford and Son.” Jose Govea, one of her neighbors, remembers seeing her struggle with a sofa and television. When she spoke to Croft late that night, she said she had bruises from moving furniture.

Hours later, at 2 a.m., she was taken hostage. Over the next seven hours, she spoke to Nichols about her daughter, her husband and her faith.

“Most of my time was spent talking to this man about my life and experiences in my life -- things that had happened to me,” she said in an interview with CNN. “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.”

Nichols had begun to trust her enough later that morning to ask an extraordinary favor: She drove behind him while he abandoned the truck he had stolen. When they returned to her apartment, she made him pancakes. He marveled over the fact that she served him real butter.

“I said, ‘Do you believe in miracles? Because if you don’t believe in miracles -- you are here for a reason,’ ” she said. “I said, ‘You know, your miracle could be that you need to -- you need to be caught for this.’ ”

And so, an hour later, he gave her $40, wished her well and let her leave. She got in her car and called 911; since then, her life has been a surreal rush of offers and entreaties. Late Tuesday, she and her aunt, Kim Rogers, were arranging a mission to get her roots dyed.

Her grandfather had kicked her out of his house during the worst times, but now he could look back and see it all as a prelude to her encounter with Nichols. “All those experiences with tough mugs -- those experiences helped her with this guy here,” he said.

The religious lesson, Machovec said, was one that should resonate with all Christians who have a dark pocket of sin in their past: “Even the bruised reed or the dimly lit candle the Lord will not forget. I don’t care how deep you go, he still loves us.”