Looking down the barrel of Brian Nichols’ gun, Ashley Smith-Robinson thought, “This must be the man who’s come to take me home because I’m not going to change.”
Although she gave her life to God at age 7, Smith-Robinson said she began “partying” and using drugs as a teenager.
Then, in 2001, her young husband was stabbed to death in a fight, leaving her to raise their 2-year-old daughter alone.
To “make the pain go away,” Smith-Robinson tried crystal methamphetamine in 2003, and in one month the drug “ripped everything away” from her.
“What I did best at that time was cover up any emotion I had with drugs,” she recently told members of Valleydale Baptist Church, Birmingham, in Birmingham Baptist Association. “That was a very long, drawn-out, miserable time in my life.”
“(It) started off as just a simple, ‘My friends are doing it, and I want to have a good time with them,’ to, ‘I’ve lost everything, including my family, my mind, my husband, my child, every materialistic thing you could imagine.’”
After three times in rehab, three days in a mental hospital and giving custody of her daughter to her aunt, Smith-Robinson felt God was mad at her and tired of her failures.
“I knew that my life was in shambles, and I was really sick and tired of it being there,” she said. “I wanted that chance to be the Christian I really feel that I am in my heart. … So I said to God, ‘I need you to help me.’”
Smith-Robinson moved to Atlanta, enrolled in medical assistant training school and worked two jobs to make ends meet. She had just finished moving into her new apartment March 11, 2005, when she was overtaken outside her door by Nichols, an accused rapist who escaped from an Atlanta courtroom, killing four people in his path.
Held captive seven hours, Smith-Robinson faced a situation that tested her faith and forced her to truly give her life to God. When Nichols asked her for drugs, she gave him the rest of the meth she had taken the previous night. But when he asked her to take the drugs with him, she refused.
“It was like Jesus said, ‘One more chance,’ and I saw it as that and said I’m not going to do that now, and given the chance I’m never going to do it again,” Smith-Robinson said. “I can’t tell you how free mentally, spiritually and emotionally I felt by ‘letting go and letting God,’ because Ashley Smith was not in control and Brian Nichols was not in control. Jesus Christ was in control and that feeling was a feeling that I wanted to last forever whether my forever was five more minutes or 15 more years.”
Eventually, Smith-Robinson talked her way out of the apartment unharmed. Soon afterward, Nichols turned himself in without a fight.
When news spread around the country that Nichols called Smith-Robinson “an angel sent from God,” she told the rest of the story in her book, “Unlikely Angel.”
“Two days after I had done drugs, it was on the front page of The Atlanta Journal-Constitution that I was ‘an angel sent from God,’ and I said ‘Oh, no. These people have no idea what they’ve just done,’” she noted. “I felt really uneasy, but I knew that the change in my life was real. … It’s been a journey.”
Calvin Kelly, pastor of Valleydale, said Smith-Robinson’s story serves as a reminder that nobody is outside the reach of Jesus Christ.
“Ashley is a beautiful picture of the grace of God,” he said. “God never gave up on her even though there were times she wanted to give up on Him. … Because she came to the point that she gave God everything, God used her and the testimony of her life.”
Since the ordeal with Nichols, Smith-Robinson remarried and is taking courses to become a radiology technician. She also works with others struggling with addictions in her church’s Celebrate Recovery program.
“There is always hope if you put that hope in Jesus Christ and let Him be the leader of your life,” she said. “Life with God is so much better. Every time I’m in the driver’s seat, I drive my car off the road.”
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