SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA (ANS) -- If there was any man seemingly beyond redemption, Kirk Martin personified that man. Full of violence and hate – having made a pact with the devil himself – only God could fashion the creative strategy to pull his feet away from the fiery abyss.

Kirk Martin

“I always thought God loved some people, just not me,” says Martin. He was the adopted fourth child of a loving Lutheran family that prayed at dinner. Confirmed at his church in Livonia, Michigan, he quickly began to stray from his godly roots.

At seven-years-old, two older boys at church held him down and sexually assaulted him. “God doesn’t love you,” they said after the assault. “God will hate you if you tell anyone. You better not tell your mom and dad because they’ll hate you too.” He bled for days as a result of the assault, but never told his parents.

A couple years later, a friend introduced him to marijuana on the school bus. “There were signs showing up of me getting in trouble,” Martin admits. “I was always lying, stealing, and beating other kids up,” he says.

His father’s response was swift and severe. “I remember cowering in the corner of the room and him bashing the snot out of me.”

“We hit you because we love you,” his mother told him.

When Martin was 11, authorities charged his minister with embezzling $275,000 from their church over a 10-year period. “One week later he dropped dead from a heart attack. I thought God got him because he was bad.”

He joined the military at 17 but only lasted six weeks. “I quickly learned I had a hair-trigger temper like my father,” he confesses. “I was picking fights with everybody.” He could hit “like a freight train” so his fights were brief – often a man would fall after only one punch.

But he met his match with a tough southern boy from Georgia, who refused to go down. “He had a jaw of steel,” Martin recounts. “I told him the first chance I get on the rifle range with live ammunition I’d put a bullet through his head.”

“They told me I was no longer able to touch weapons,” and superiors ordered a psychiatric evaluation.

As he sat in the hospital rubber room, a military doctor confronted him. “What’s up, private?” the man asked.

“I hate people,” Martin replied. “I would like to kill people.”

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