Tori Smith was in Florida during spring break from law school in 2012 when a phone call from the U.S. Army changed her life.
After the voice on the other end confirmed Smith’s identity, it conveyed devastating news: “I’m sorry to inform you that your husband stepped on a bomb while on patrol in Afghanistan.”
Two thoughts passed through Smith’s mind before the shocking news reached her heart. One was the memory of her phone conversation with her husband, Andrew, the previous evening.
“He said he was bored and asked me to send him a sand wedge and some golf balls,” Smith recalls. “I was relieved he was bored.”
The next day was Andrew’s first outing in the war-torn country, where the U.S. had been battling the Taliban for over a decade since 9/11. He stepped on the improvised explosive device while his unit was on patrol.
The second thought arrived on the heels of the first and buffered the shock to her heart.
“I thought, ‘If Andrew were dead, they wouldn’t call me, they’d come to see me,” Smith says. “That’s the way my brain works.”
A bride of 10 weeks at that point, Smith was correct – her husband was alive. However, he was not well. His legs were virtually gone, and the explosion had ripped through his abdomen and caused damage that placed his life at the edge of eternity.
At the request of the Army, Smith immediately traveled to Ooltewah to be with Andrew’s parents and waited for either another phone call or a knock on the door.
Listening skills
Smith says she relives the experience of learning about her husband’s catastrophic injuries each time she tells the story. Her most recent public telling took place in Hamilton County General Sessions Court on Sept. 10, when she was installed as the new judge of Division 2. The bench became vacant when its previous occupant, Alex McVeagh, won a seat in Circuit Court in Hamilton County’s August election, triggering the process within the county to appoint a replacement.
As the 38-year-old Smith stood before a courtroom packed with cheering family, friends and colleagues, she spoke about the moments that had defined her life up to that point – including Andrew’s harrowing ordeal. She also said she’d dreamed of becoming a judge since she was in third grade at Apison Elementary.
“My third grade teacher asked us what we wanted to be when we grew up. I told Miss McEachern I wanted to be a judge. She said, ‘Judges need better listening skills.’ I remember standing against the wall at recess watching my friends play and thinking, ‘I’ll show you Miss McEachern!’”
The youngest of four children and the only girl among her siblings, the defiant Smith was likely a product of her home environment. Her parents raised her to be resilient, she said during her investiture, with her father often playfully telling her, “If you’re gonna be dumb, you gotta be tough.”
Smith’s father was joking, of course, but he also stood by and watched as her three older brothers practiced their wrestling moves on her.
“My brothers cut me zero slack, and I grew up stronger because of it,” Smith said with a hearty voice that was more spitfire than Southern Belle. “My family taught me that if I wanted something, I’d have to work hard for it.”
The Monday after her swearing-in, Smith is seated in the chambers behind the courtroom as she credits her parents with inspiring her to become a judge. She says she hoped the bench would be as much about helping people as it would be about serving Lady Justice.
“My parents were always helping others. They lived paycheck to paycheck, but they always made sure others didn’t go without. Everyone always had a spot at the dinner table. Mom and dad were very good about looking out for people.”
Before Smith made the dream of her third-grade self come true, she also learned that achieving her goal would be a hollow victory if she didn’t have the right person with her when she did.
A Hallmark romance
In some movies or novels, the romance is relegated to a subplot. Lift out the bits about the protagonist falling in love, and the main narrative would survive intact.
Not so with Smith, who at her swearing-in stood before well over 100 of the people who are closest to her in this world and said, “I wouldn’t be here today if it weren’t for Andrew.”
Smith and her future husband met at a pickup basketball game when she was a senior at Hamilton Heights Christian Academy, a private high school in Chattanooga. Over time, the pair forged a close friendship that lasted through five years together at Lee University, but neither expressed an interest in dating the other.
After Andrew graduated from Lee, Smith knew he’d be joining the military. He’d wanted to serve since 9/11, she says, and he’d made good on his promise to his parents to earn a college degree first, so it was time to enlist.
Meanwhile, Smith was laying the foundation for her own future, which would include an education only if she found a way beyond her family to pay for it.
Enter her tribe.
As the daughter of a full-blooded Native American father and a Caucasian mother, Smith is half Native American. This qualified her to receive a scholarship from her and her father’s tribe, the Poarch Band of Creek Indians, a federally recognized tribe with reservation lands in lower Alabama. The tribe not only provided a scholarship that allowed Smith to complete undergraduate school debt free but another endowment to attend law school.
As this and other proverbial doors opened, Smith stepped gratefully through them. However, after one very real door – the door of the bus that would take Andrew to basic training – closed, she was left standing outside in a cloud of motor vehicle exhaust and confusion.
“As Andrew was leaving, he hugged me and said, ‘I love you.’ He’d said that before, but this time, it felt different. When I went to a restaurant with a friend afterward, I couldn’t eat.”
The pair wrote each other letters while Andrew was at Fort Benning (now Fort Moore) in Georgia, although neither of them mentioned their strange goodbye. Instead, Smith saved that topic for a phone call on Thanksgiving Day.
One can imagine the Hallmark Channel having a field day with their tête-à-tête:
“Hey, you said you love me,” Smith mentioned.
“Yes, I love you,” Andrew confirmed.
“No, you love me, love me.”
“Yeah, I love you, love you.”
Smith and Andrew became engaged the following March and then married that December, between her first and second semesters at Michigan State University College of Law. While their joy was profound, Smith says, neither of them knew the tragic turn their lives would soon take as they existed half a world apart.
Act of love
Smith can easily form and hold a smile. During her investiture, for example, one could have contended that the constant grin on her face brightened the courtroom by at least a few lumens. But as she explains why she spent the next two years of her life by Andrew’s side as he endured a grueling recovery at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, her expression tightens.
For Smith, her bedside vigil was an act of love and of patriotism.
“It was my honor to be my husband’s caregiver; I didn’t want to be anywhere else,” Smith explains. “I wanted to live out my wedding vows; I wanted to be with Andrew in sickness and in health. And I wanted to serve my country; I wanted to care for the man who said, ‘I’ll go anywhere and do anything to stop the fight from coming here.’”
After returning to Ooltewah, Smith camped out on her in-laws couch for a few days and fixed her gaze on the front door, praying for a phone call instead of a knock. When the call came and a voice summoned her to Bethesda, she dropped out of law school without hesitation. She says there’s not one thread of regret within her.
“There was not one moment when I thought, ‘I wish I was in law school instead.’ And, it was a long road, but praise God, Andrew became better.”
As Andrew submitted to 30 abdominal surgeries, and often went several months without eating or drinking, Smith noted not only his resolve and bravery, but also the strength of the other patients at Walter Reed, and her insides shifted.
“I saw men and women who volunteered to serve this country battle to regain their independence. They used to jump out of airplanes, and now they were struggling to feed themselves and relearn all the things we take for granted,” Smith says. “Seeing what those men and women went through softened my heart but toughened the rest of me. It showed me what hard really is, and it changed my perspective about the things I thought were difficult.”
When Smith and her husband finally left Walter Reed after two years, they returned to Apison, where people with the nonprofit Steps2Hope handed them the keys to a handicap-ready home built by nearly 1,000 volunteers using donated materials and furnishings.
Soon after, Smith returned to law school. Her tribe renewed her scholarship, Gov. Bill Haslam made a phone call to Lincoln Memorial University in Knoxville, and then she was driving 100 miles from her driveway to the Duncan School of Law. Doors were opening again, and each one brought Smith closer to the dream she’d held since third grade.
Law and order
While Smith was in the throes of law school, she saw herself becoming a prosecutor. When a judge asked, “Who represents the United States in this matter?” she imagined she’d be the one to stand and say, “I do, your honor.”
“I’m a law-and-order person,” Smith beams. “I love the Constitution. It makes our country great, and if it means anything to anyone, it means something to everyone.”
Smith held on to this vision of her future as she returned to the rigors of a legal education. She also safeguarded her new mindset.
“I felt motivated rather than stressed. Instead of complaining about how much I had to read, write or study, I thought, ‘All I have to do is learn. What a blessing it is to be able to pursue my dream.’”
However, the door that opened for Smith near the end of law school was not the one she’d been expecting to step through. Instead of becoming a prosecutor, she found herself representing criminal defendants in court as an intern at the office of Public Defender Steve Smith.
When Smith offered her a position with his office after she’d completed her education, she accepted.
“Steve always had our backs and allowed us to do our job. The attorneys he’s assembled are some of the best in Chattanooga, and I loved learning from them and feeling like a part of their team.”
Smith also embraced the sacred notion that the U.S. Constitution guarantees specific rights to everyone who stands before a judge.
“I’d be defending a horrible case – one that had punched me in the gut – and I’d remind myself that the person alleged to have committed the crime was entitled to the same constitutional protections I was,” she says. “I also loved talking with defendants, and showing them grace and kindness.
“If everyone did their job well, then we usually arrived at the right result.”
During Smith’s swearing-in, Judge Kevin Wilson of Collegedale praised her compassion, as well as her ability to steer the court toward an appropriate resolution for problematic defendants.
“Tori helped people in a way that allowed the court to function. The toughest challenges we face in general sessions court are the folks who don’t do what we tell them to do, and we have to choose between locking them up or pursuing other options. That’s where Tori assisted me. I’d become frustrated with someone, but she has a heart for helping people, and she’d always try to craft something that would benefit them.”
Smith had been a PD for six years when McVeagh’s seat became available. She had more than her years of experience as an attorney under her belt, however; she also had a set of wrestling moves that could pin her older brothers to the floor, an upbringing that had prepared her to face adversity, life experience that had tested her like fire – and from which she’d emerged purified and refined – and an education that her professors and defendants had provided in equal measure.
Yet when a sixth county commissioner called Smith’s name at the end of the selection process, giving her the votes she needed to secure the bench, she bowed her head and prayed, “God, make me worthy.”
Her boss was not alone in claiming she already was. “I’ve never met any person better suited to be a judge than Tori Smith,” the public defender posted on Facebook.
Retired Gen. B.B. Bell echoed this comment at Smith’s investiture.
“Tori has been through the gauntlet of life and come out smiling and ready to be a judge in Hamilton County. She’s fair and just, and she knows what right is. Those things are crucial in our society today.”
The next chapter
The gauntlet Bell mentioned prepared Smith for more than a judgeship; it also readied her to be a wife and a mother.
When Smith and Andrew were still friends, they traveled together to Mexico on a mission trip. Upon seeing children at an orphanage who were “desperate for a mom and dad,” Smith says, their hearts broke.
“I said, ‘Whoever I marry is going to have to be OK with adoption.’ He said, ‘Me, too.’”
Today, Smith and her husband are the parents of three children ranging in age from 3 to 8. They adopted the youngest and the oldest. If the robe she wore at her investiture had had buttons, her pride as she introduced her children to the gathering would have popped them off.
Smith is just as proud of her husband, who joins her in serving their church and community. On Sundays, she teaches children at Silverdale Baptist Church, while he devotes a portion of his spare time to coaching youth baseball.
“Every pitch, Andrew is out there talking with the kids and trying to help them be better,” Smith says. “He’s a good man. He’s the best man ever made.”
Smith adds that Andrew is the most important relationship in her life beyond Christ, so she’s intentional about tending the love they first planted as friends. From praying together, to parenting as a united front, to going on weekly dates, they nourish their marriage daily, she says.
However, Smith might want to cultivate a better attitude about losing to her husband in golf.
“Getting beat by a man with no legs is infuriating,” she says with a burst of laughter. “But what can I do? He’s smarter than I am. I’ll get in the woods and, all of a sudden, I’ll think I can wrap a shot around a tree. Meanwhile, he’s Steady Eddie.”
Smith will need the times of refreshing her family can provide as she tackles a new set of challenges as a judge. Judge Boyd Patterson alluded to these coming trials when he welcomed her as a judge at her swearing-in.
“Your success will be measured differently,” Patterson began. “The entire docket will be yours, so you won’t be able to do the discovery you did as a public defender. You won’t be able to talk with witnesses in the hallway before a hearing, either, which means you’ll often have to make decisions with less information than you used to have. In your new role, your success will be measured less by you driving toward a particular resolution and more by you arriving at a fair resolution. Just follow the law in a meaningful way.”
Smith promised to do just that.
“I want every person who comes before me to feel seen, heard and valued. That doesn’t mean I’m always going to do what they want me to do; I want to bring my humanity to the bench, but I’m not going to be soft. I will, however, try to treat everyone with respect and strive every day to take my third grade teacher’s advice and be a good listener.”