Good Guy with a Gun #42: Commerce City, CO

Original incident: December 12, 2023. Mom was driving. Her son poured gas on her and tried to light her on fire. The Good Guy with a Gun stopped him.

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Normally I relay these stories from the perspective of the good guy with the gun. This one, though, calls for the mother’s point of view.

Mom, 62, was out running errands with her 41-year-old son, Matthew Nichols. It wasn’t a good time. Matthew was angry because Mom had sold her restaurant and was going to sell her house, which meant that he’d have no job or place to stay, and he claimed that he cheated her out of an inheritance he felt entitled to.

Mom was driving her Lexus with Matthew in the passenger seat, and he got more and more aggressive.

Not to mention weird. They apparently had electric clippers in the car, and he threatened to shave her hair with them “if she didn’t answer his questions quickly and truthfully.”

And if that’s not weird enough, he somehow drenched her with gasoline. Did he do it while they were stopped at a gas station? Did he bring gas into the car with him with premeditation? The news reports don’t say. A Facebook post from Commerce City PD says he “dumped a cup of gasoline on his mother...while she was driving.” He had an open cup of gasoline in the car? Whatever: The point is that he also had a lighter, and he sparked it, threatening to burn her alive if she tried to get help or run away.

Desperate, Mom spotted a construction area on the side of the road — flat dirt, men working — and swung quickly into it, opening the door and leaping out.

Matthew grabbed her from the passenger seat and tried to pull her back in, but she pulled harder, jumping out and screaming for help.

That didn’t stop Matthew, who leapt out of the car, grabbed her jacket, and threw her to the ground. “Don’t let him near me,” she screamed. “I’ve got gas all over me. He poured gas on me.” Sure enough, he pulled out his lighter and tried to set her on fire.

Thank God, the cavalry was on the way. Of the Good Samaritans who tried to intervene, Ashton Miller is the one who gets mentioned in the reports. “I got in between him and her, and he had a cordless razor,” he said. “I didn’t know what it was. All I saw was a shiny edge. At first, I thought that was a straight edge or a box cutter.”

Yeah, why would you think someone was holding a cordless razor? Naturally, he was afraid that this man, who was trying to light a woman on fire, might also try to harm him.

So Miller drew his concealed handgun. “Once he realized that I had a firearm, he started to listen and calmed down,” he said. “He laid down on the ground and I had the site foreman grab handcuffs out of my truck so we could handcuff him.”

Handcuffs, really? Yes, Miller had previously been a security guard, and he keeps handcuffs in his medical bag.

Ashton Miller, a Good Samaritan who was prepared with a handgun and handcuffs.

Miller didn’t realize that Mom had gasoline on her at first, and he didn’t know what the story was, so he had her lay on the ground, too, until the police arrived. (For what it’s worth, there was enough gas on her that she left a dark spot on the ground after she got up.)

And there the two lay, as Matthew continued to threaten her, saying “she messed with the wrong son and better watch her back when he gets out,” the Denver Post tells us. But for all Matthew’s sputtering, at least things were under control for the police when they arrived.

In the end, I guess things worked out: On August 23, 2024, Matthew Nichols was convicted of Attempted Second-Degree Murder, Attempted First-Degree Assault, and Third-Degree Motor Vehicle Theft. Now — regardless of his supposedly lost inheritance or his mother’s sale of her house and restaurant — Matthew has a place to stay, and I would guess that he has consistent work requirements. (I can’t find specific information about the sentencing that was supposed to take place on October 28.)

Sources

The two sources to read here are the Denver Post and 9 News.

• The Post does a great job of summarizing the affidavit, putting in a great number of details that bring the story to life when it first broke.

• 9 News interviewed Ashton Miller extensively and sympathetically, noting that Miller knew that drawing his weapon increased his chance of going to jail. This was apparently published right after the incident and updated after the conviction.

9 News isn’t the only source that’s sympathetic to Miller: The Commerce City PD posted about him on Facebook twice, once after the incident and once when Nichols was convicted.

The conviction itself is covered in a press release from the DA.

KDVR Fox 31 did a great job covering the event in real time, first reporting about it as a possible carjacking (certainly a reasonable guess) and then giving a follow-up once more of the details were known.

Even the least detailed source, the Belleville News-Democrat, gave a solid write-up based on the coverage from 9 News and the PD’s Facebook post.

John Lott’s Crime Prevention Research Center, or CPRC, covered this story in a round-up of stories from December of 2023.

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