ATLANTA — Pressure mounted Monday for swift action to prevent more potentially lethal security lapses at the Fulton County Courthouse, as somber and subdued employees returned to the workplace where three days earlier a state judge and two other people were slain, allegedly by a rampaging prisoner.
"There darn well better be some changes," said Senior Superior Court Judge Philip F. Etheridge. "We're not talking rocket science here."
Police said the suspect in Friday's courthouse slayings, Brian Gene Nichols, 33, overpowered 51-year-old Deputy Cynthia Hall to obtain the gun that was used in the shootings. Etheridge, referring to having the deputy guard Nichols, a former college football player, said, "You don't put a grandmother in charge of a linebacker alone."
Meanwhile, Ashley Smith, who was taken hostage by Nichols but talked her way to freedom and turned him in to police Saturday, issued an emotional plea Monday night for privacy.
"As I am sure you can imagine, this event has been extremely difficult and exhausting for me and my extended family," said the 26-year-old in a brief televised statement from Augusta, her hometown in eastern Georgia. "I have experienced just about every emotion I could imagine in the span of a few days."
Smith, who has a 5-year-old daughter who lives with an aunt, has said that her husband was stabbed to death four years ago. Smith lives in Duluth, a suburb of Atlanta.
Although Smith has become the object of national attention, she said her role in bringing Nichols' alleged reign of violence to a close "was really very small in the scheme of things. The real heroes are the judicial and law enforcement officials who gave their lives and those who risked their lives to bring this to an end."
Smith, who had been working as a waitress in a sports bar in Gwinnett County, northeast of Atlanta, said she spoke of God, family and the purpose of a person's life as she urged Nichols to surrender to police.
"He said he thought I was an angel sent from God," she said Sunday, in the first public retelling of her captivity.
Authorities said Monday they had no reason to doubt her story. Officer Darren Moloney, Gwinnett County police spokesman, said, "The more we talked to her, the more we became convinced" she was telling the truth.
