Atlanta ? The woman held hostage in her apartment by the suspect in Atlanta’s courthouse slayings said Sunday that her ordeal began with the man sticking a gun in her side and tying her up, but ended with the weapons on the floor as he let her go to see her young daughter.

After hours of talking about the killings, their families and God, Ashley Smith said Brian Nichols “just wanted some normalness to his life.”

Smith, 26, called 911 after she was freed, and police soon surrounded her suburban apartment complex. Nichols, who police say killed three people in the courthouse Friday and a federal agent later, gave up peacefully, waving a white towel in surrender.

“I honestly think when I looked at him that he didn’t want to do it anymore,” Smith said in a statement televised on CNN. If he didn’t give up, she told him, “Lots more people are probably going to get hurt and you’re probably going to die.”

Nichols allegedly overpowered a courthouse deputy escorting him to his rape trial Friday and took the deputy’s gun, then entered the courtroom where his trial was being held and killed the presiding judge and court reporter. He also is accused of killing a deputy who tried to stop him outside the courthouse and a federal agent during his flight from authorities.

Smith said Nichols, 33, took her hostage in the parking lot outside her apartment when she returned from a store about 2 a.m. “He said, ‘I’m not going to hurt you if you just do what I say,”‘ she said. “‘I don’t want to hurt you. I don’t want to hurt anybody else.'”

She said Nichols tied her up with masking tape, a curtain and extension cord and told her to sit in the bathroom while he took a shower.

She said as the night wore on, she tried to win his trust. Choking back tears, she said she told Nichols that her husband died four years ago and if he hurt her, her little girl, who is 5, wouldn’t have a mother or a father.

Nichols eventually untied her, and some of the fear lessened as they talked. Nichols told Smith he felt like “he was already dead,” but Smith urged him to consider the fact that he was still alive a “miracle.”

“You’re here in my apartment for some reason,” she told him, saying he might be destined to be caught and to spread the word of God to fellow prisoners.

He eventually put down the guns police say he took when he overwhelmed sheriff’s deputies, putting them on the floor and later under a bed.

When morning came, Nichols was “overwhelmed” when Smith made him pancakes, she said. They watched television news reports about the slaying and the manhunt for Nichols.

Police said they were impressed by the way Smith handled herself.

“She acted very cool and levelheaded. We don’t normally see that in our profession,” said Gwinnett County Police Officer Darren Moloney. “It was an absolutely best case scenario that happened, a complete opposite of what you expected to happen. We were prepared for the worst and got the best.”

Nichols could appear in federal court as early as today to face a charge of possession of a firearm by a person under indictment, the charge authorities are using to keep Nichols in custody while they sort out charges in the slayings, said U.S. Atty. David Nahmias.