At 2 a.m. on a cold March night in suburban Atlanta, Ashley Smith reaches for her front-door keys following a run to the local QuikTrip for cigarettes.

In the seconds it takes to unlock her front door, a tall man in a red down jacket and baseball cap swoops out of the shadows, grabs her arm, and sticks a gun in her face. As he shoves her into the apartment, Ashley begins screaming and pleading for her life. “I have a five-year-old daughter who has no daddy,” she cries. “If you kill me, she won’t have a mommy either.” The intruder shows no mercy. If the police arrive, he says, he will kill her, kill them, and probably himself.

The intruder, Brian Nichols, has already murdered four people on this dreadful day in 2005, including a judge, a sheriff’s deputy, and a court stenographer. The rampage began when he was brought into court to be sentenced for rape. He overpowered the deputy, grabbed her gun, and began shooting. His escape has triggered a statewide manhunt.

Nichols ties up Ashley with masking tape and an extension cord. He asks if she has any marijuana. No, she replies but, to appease him, says she has some crystal meth. He unties her, and demands that she show him how to use the stuff. With the practiced hands of a drug-using “loser,” she cuts it and tells him how to snort it. But Nichols doesn’t want to do the drugs alone. He presses her to snort the meth with him.

Ashley realizes that if she refuses, Nichols may kill her. But she has been struggling to kick her drug habit, and knows she must now “close the door for good.” In a moment of clarity that she believes came from her newly recommitted relationship with Jesus, she knows that she would rather die than do drugs with Brian Nichols. If the police are going to find her dead, they will not find drugs in her system.
She says no.

Then, talking quietly, she begins to tell Nichols about her life.

“Are you a born-again Christian?” he asks. She says yes, and asks if he is. He says yes. “I think there’s a demon inside me,” he says, “but I’m a child of God. I’ve got this demon inside me,” he says again. “I need to get it out of me. I feel like God and Satan are fighting—fighting to take me.”

He says he chose her apartment complex randomly, that “I was just driving around.” When she tells him that maybe God sent him here, that there must be a reason he is still alive, she senses him react. She silently speaks to God: If there’s a purpose for him being here, then that means you’re really with me, right?

Nichols listens, and then says, “Maybe you’re my angel sent by God. Maybe that’s what this is. Maybe he led me right to you.”

Ashley asks if she can read. He says yes. From a wicker basket on top of her dresser, she pulls out a copy of The
Purpose Driven Life by Rick Warren. She had recently begun reading the book as part of trying to rebuild her life after years of destructive behavior. She reads aloud from Day 32: “God deserves your best. He shaped you for a purpose, and he expects you to make the most of what you have been given.”

Nichols wants to know what Ashley thinks her purpose is. She says it’s to serve God by helping others. “What do you think mine is?” he says. “Maybe it’s to minister to people in prison,” she says. As the minutes become hours, Ashley urges Nichols to turn himself in.

After seven hours, Nichols says Ashley can leave to meet up with her daughter. She drives away, and immediately calls 911. Police surround the building. And Nichols surrenders without a fight.

Ashley has never done drugs again.

Photo: Quantrell Colbert

It is 2009. Ashley Smith Robinson stands in front of her weekly Celebrate Recovery meeting to give out chips marking sobriety milestones. “Hi, I’m Ashley, a grateful believer in Jesus Christ,” she tells the group at the Blackshear Place Baptist Church in Flowery Branch, Georgia. “My struggle was with chemical dependency, and by the grace of God, I’ve been clean for four years.”

A short time later, as a leader for a small group of newcomers, Ashley quietly explains the program to two women who are visiting for the first time and are clearly apprehensive. “Everything that is said here, stays here” she reassures them. “This is a place to take off your mask, to learn and grow, and become strong again.”

Then, quickly and matter-of-factly, Ashley offers a capsule summary of how she got to the program herself. “I was raised as a Christian and accepted Jesus Christ as my savior when I was seven years old. But I sure did not live it from the time I was 17 to 24. Many tragedies happened in my life. God was trying to get my attention, but I closed my eyes tighter and tighter, going further and further down into drugs and alcohol and sex and all different kinds of things. The turning point of my life was when I was held hostage. I thought I was going to die that night, and that I had no chances left. But God showed me that he wasn’t done with me yet—and my life is radically changed.”

Both newcomers say they will be back. Neither one has a clue that this Ashley is the Ashley Smith who, four years ago, at 26, was the subject of a global media blitz and, for a time, could barely walk the streets without being recognized.



Ashley’s life turned in her senior year of high school. Growing up in Augusta, her dream had been to play college basketball at Duke University, where she twice attended basketball camp. But when she was 17, Ashley was overwhelmed by the pressure of intense athletic training, homework, and what she considered an outsize load of household chores. “I’d had enough,” she says. “I wanted to have fun.” She quickly got into marijuana, ecstasy, and cocaine, and by graduation was so out of control her mother and stepfather kicked her out of the house. That summer, she was arrested and held overnight for shoplifting Tommy Hilfiger shirts at Macy’s to trade for cocaine.

At 19, she met Mack Smith, a carpenter, and became pregnant. She married Smith a few months later, and three months after that gave birth to their daughter, Paige. As Mack built his business, Ashley took care of the baby in their small rented house. Friday nights they partied. Following a night of partying in August 2001, Mack was stabbed during a senseless parking-lot melee. He died in Ashley’s arms.

To numb her suffering, Ashley turned to increasing doses of marijuana, Xanax, and ecstasy, and frequently swallowed 30 pain pills a day. Waitressing jobs fueled her supply (“drugs are all over the place in restaurants”), and she also became a dealer. She was eventually hooked by the drug she’d sworn to avoid: crystal meth. “It nearly stole my life.”

Watching Ashley’s self-destruction, her mother’s sister, Ashley’s aunt Kim, stepped in, and took custody of three-year-old Paige. “The hardest day of my whole life was the day I took Paige over there, and realized what a loser I was,” says Ashley. But she told her aunt she would die if she tried to quit doing drugs. A few days later she almost did, crashing her car; she woke up in the trauma unit with broken arms, broken ribs, and a severed pancreas.

During the next two years, Ashley landed in three rehab programs. She was ejected from the first for bad behavior, and considered the second one a joke (“people were doing drugs at the residence”). But she realized she wanted her daughter back, and the custody court required that she complete a program. So she entered rehab in south Georgia in January 2004, and stayed for three and a half months. She remained clean for two months after that before relapsing with her old crowd.

Then, on February 7, 2005, a month before her encounter with Brian Nichols, Ashley attended an Augusta church with her aunt and uncle. Her eyes fell on a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, which was being discussed that day. The question on the cover—“What on Earth Am I Here For?”—captured her. “I just knew this was a question I needed to answer,” she says. Impulsively, she pulled out a dollar bill she’d used to snort drugs, and put it into the offering plate. “I had a feeling of reaching out to God because I’d ignored God for so long. It was a feeling of, ‘Okay, God, if I read this book, maybe you’ll help me.’ ”

Back in Atlanta, where she was working two jobs and attending night school to become a medical assistant, Ashley began studying one chapter a day, taking notes, keeping a journal. Her drug use dropped dramatically, to an occasional hit. “I was hanging on for dear life, trying to trust God,” she says. By the time Nichols stormed into her life, she had reached the passage she read to him from Day 32.

Ashley fled to Augusta after the ordeal, and moved in with her aunt, uncle, and five-year-old Paige. “I needed time to get to know my child again, time to figure out the change that had happened in me,” she says. “I realized that God had given me a second chance. I should not have made it out alive. Nobody else did, and I was the one who probably shouldn’t have because I had nothing good to show in my life.”

Two months after Nichols’s capture, she agreed to collaborate on a book. The experience was healing. “I was dealing with things that I’d always covered up with drugs,” she says, “and allowing myself to relive them all sober.” Unlikely Angel was published later that year by Zondervan. Ashley gave a portion of the royalties to a fund in memory of the courthouse shooting victims. She also paid a visit to judge Roland Barnes’s widow, who told her the judge would have been proud that Ashley’s life had changed.

And her life continued to change. Her book promotion tour took her all over the U.S. In Chicago, on Oprah Winfrey’s show, she had a surprise: Oprah brought Rick Warren onstage. It was the first time Ashley had met him. Then, in October 2007, Ashley spoke at Saddleback Church about her life.

Ashley started attending her aunt’s church. She joined a Bible study, and became involved with the church family. Wanting to share her faith, she reconnected with an old friend, Daniel Robinson, who was doing time in prison for counterfeiting money to pay for drugs. She sent him a copy of The Purpose Driven Life, and they exchanged letters. Daniel soon got involved in prison ministry. When he was released in 2006, he went to see Ashley. “ I could see he was a different person,” she says. They were married a year later, Ashley in a white gown, with Paige and Daniel’s six-year-old daughter, Riley, as flower girls.

The Robinsons now live in a hilly subdivision of Gainesville, Georgia, about an hour north of Atlanta. Daniel is an apprentice electrician, and Ashley is in a two-year program to become a radiology technician. Paige, who just turned 10, lives with them, and Riley, 8, visits often. Both Robinsons are active at Blackshear Place Baptist Church, serving as co-leaders of the newcomers group in Celebrate Recovery, and Ashley continues to speak at churches around the country. “I feel God gave me a testimony to share, that he wants me to tell people that it’s never too late,” she says. “It is important to say, ‘Look, this is what God brought me through. You guys who think I have it all together, well, it wasn’t always like this.’ ”

That’s because Ashley Smith Robinson finally knows what on earth she’s here for.