“Today is my son’s birthday and I am about to die.”
That’s the thought that ran through Angel Mack’s mind when Joshua Asher pointed a gun at her face, told her she was going to die and pulled the trigger.
She heard the click, but the gun was empty. She was alive, but she was never the same after that day.
On Aug. 17, Asher was sentenced to 60 years in prison for attempting to murder Mack and her best friend, Nicole Hillen, on Aug. 23, 2016.
He will spend 40 years at the Indiana Department of Corrections. He will then serve 10 of the remaining 20 years on probation. He was represented by public defender Jacob Moore.
Asher shot Mack, his ex-girlfriend, in her right thigh and foot. Hillen sustained a surface gunshot wound to the chest. Both survived.
Mack had just filed for a protective order against Asher. She also had been arrested for domestic battery against him a few days prior and had spent the weekend in jail.
Mack, a mother of three, was going to spend the day with her son and her family, but first, she returned to the home that she and Asher had shared on Lucas Hollow Road to pick up birthday decorations and gifts for her youngest son, her “momma’s boy.” Hillen, her friend, had gone with her and driven Mack’s van.
Asher appeared with a gun from a nearby wooded area.
At first, Mack thought the shots were the backfiring of a neighbor’s car. She noticed her foot was in “excruciating” pain. At that point, she thought the car had backfired so loud that it injured her foot.
But Asher appeared, and continued shooting with every other step he took.
“The only thing I could think to do to was protect myself. I stood on one leg. I protected my torso and face. All I could do was scream, ‘Oh my god,’ over and over again,” Mack testified.
Hillen was still gathering items from the van when Asher approached her. “I don’t think she really knew what was going on,” Mack testified.
“As she got out, he was making it up to the van. He said, ‘Die (expletive),’ and pulled the trigger. That bullet hit her in the chest. He walked past her and got to the porch. He told me I was going to die.”
But the gun was empty.
Asher turned around, went to their landlord’s house who lived next door, gave the gun to him and hugged him before walking down the road, where police intercepted him as he kneeled and put his hands on his head.
“It was the longest, scariest thing I have ever endured,” Mack said of the shooting. “To me, it felt like a lifetime.”
‘I am not the same person’
“He was mad. He was coming to me and the van,” Hillen testified.
“I sat back in the van. It didn’t register then that I was shot in my chest,” she said.
Hillen didn’t realize she had been shot until she called 911 once the two made it inside the house.
During his testimony, Asher said he thought Hillen was another man whom he had allegedly seen with Mack at the house.
Both women testified to the trauma they’ve endured since that day.
“Josh did not succeed in killing me that day. He took my life from me. I am not the same person that I used to be,” Mack said.
After the incident, Mack’s life went into a “downward spiral,” from losing her home, to not being able to find a job, to substance abuse.
Her ex-husband used the incident to keep her children from her, she said.
She also attempted suicide. “How do you care about a life you don’t care about anymore?” she said.
“It’s been hell,” Hillen said. She also lost her home after the incident. She doesn’t speak to her child anymore. She doesn’t have a relationship with her mother now, and she also attempted suicide.
“I’ll never forget what he did to me. … I don’t care what he thought I did, there was no reason for it,” Hillen said. “I have to live with this for the rest of my life.”
The court played a recorded jail visit between Asher and his father which happened one day after the shooting.
“I felt that this recorded conversation would truly demonstrate the true mental state of Josh Asher and the callous attitude at having shot two unsuspecting women,” Prosecutor Ted Adams explained in a press release.
Adams noted that Asher “appeared to be offended when his father called him a ‘bad shot.’
“Asher exclaimed that he had lethally missed his victims because he was ‘running.’ He explained that had he ‘stopped, planted both of my feet, I could have killed both of them with one shot,'” Adams said.
In the recording, Asher told his father that the victims were “lucky he didn’t have more bullets than what I did.”
The couple also had a dog together. Mack testified to finding the dog in a pool of blood in the home; it also had been shot during the incident. The dog did survive. As part of a plea deal, a Level 6 felony charge of torturing or mutilating a vertebrate animal charge was dropped.
Asher’s father also told him that local news channel Fox 59 had his picture on every half-hour with a story about the shooting. Asher asked his father if he had recorded it.
During his testimony at sentencing, Asher said he would go back and change what happened if he could.
He said he was at the home that day to get a handgun from a gun safe he had hidden in the woods, because he thought someone had been in the home messing with the guns while Mack was in jail that weekend. That gun case also had an AK47 in it.
He was making his way back to the home from the woods when he saw the van pull up and Mack exit the passenger side. He believed Hillen was the “man” who was at his house with Mack a few nights earlier. “I feel sorry for Nicole (Hillen). In my mind, you’re not there at all,” he said.
Asher said he did not intend to kill anyone.
“I knew from day one that I had done wrong. I knew that the whole time,” he said.
‘I forgive you’
Toward the end of her testimony, Mack closed her eyes and covered her face before speaking to the man who shot her twice.
“I forgive you for myself — not because I want to forgive you to make you feel better, but because if I don’t, I won’t get through it. I hope that you find happiness. I know your life has changed now, too,” Mack said.
Asher was looking at her, after spending the majority of the time looking down during her testimony.
“You are a monster, but I am forgiving you and letting it go,” she told him. “This is my chance to get it out and start to move forward.”
Mack asked Judge Judith Stewart to have “no mercy” when determining his prison sentence because he did not have mercy for her and Hillen.
Deputy Prosecuting Attorney Tom Barr listed multiple circumstances for the judge to consider to enhance Asher’s sentence, including the harm the victims suffered, their lasting trauma, and Asher’s criminal history, which includes misdemeanor charges for domestic battery and criminal recklessness.
Asher also was charged with 14 counts of invasion of privacy in a separate case for contacting Mack while he was still in jail. According to the prosecutor and Mack, Asher also tried from his jail cell to arrange for other people to attack Mack. “I was afraid to even leave my house,” she said.
Moore argued that if Asher wanted to kill Mack and whoever he thought was with her, he would have used the AK47.
“If he had gone there to kill, he did a lousy job at planning it,” Moore said.
After the gun was empty “he could have continued to attack with his bare hands, or kick the door into the house, grabbed a knife and continued an attack. He stopped after the bullets ran out. What we have is intent to kill that existed for a period of time,” Moore said.
He asked the judge to “take mercy” on Asher, 32, so that he could have “meaningful years at the end of his life” once he’s out of prison.
Asher testified he would further his education while in prison and that he plans to have a relationship with his two children once he is released.
‘They could finally move on’
Prior to being sentenced this month, Asher tried to withdraw his guilty plea. After thinking about the plea, Asher felt that “he no longer felt he had specific intent” to murder his victims, Moore said.
Stewart denied that motion.
It wasn’t the first time Asher had wanted to change his plea. In December 2016, he rejected his plea agreement and asked for a jury trial. The court then granted four continuances.
A week before the trial was to start, Asher pleaded guilty to both counts of attempted murder and the court accepted his plea. But then he told a probation officer that he wanted to withdraw that plea and he wanted a new public defender.
Adams alleged that all the delays were an “act of psychological warfare” against the victims.
After the sentencing, Adams said he and Barr saw the two victims laughing outside the courthouse.
“It was as if an enormous burden had been lifted off of their shoulders, and they felt at ease enough, in the shadow of a courthouse that, for nearly two years, brought them emotional pain and letdown,” he said in the press release.
“I have spent an enormous amount of time with them, and I could not remember a time of either one laughing robustly. … They could finally move on.”
