Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  But Brent only saw a couple bright flashes and heard two muffled pops. No pain as the bullets blasted through him …no sense of falling …no sound …no real grasp of time itself …as if he might have missed the moment of his own death, had it come.

  But he wasn’t dead. Yet. He lay dazed, facedown on the floor, wondering what had just happened.

  Pain and awareness seeped through him slowly, as if his body were just waking from a deep sleep. He felt his own warm blood puddling in a slowly widening circle around him and he watched it soaking into the synthetic carpet. My God, this is real! He felt like he’d taken a cannonball in the chest, and his gut clenched. That son of a bitch just shot me! He saw two spent shell casings on the floor nearby and his head spun as he wondered if this was how he would die, right here, alone on the floor. Where is Scott? Where is Kathy?

  Three more shots rang out.

  The first hit administrative assistant Kathy Van Camp in one temple and exited the other, slicing her facial artery and destroying her eyes. The other two hit Brent’s partner Scott Manspeaker in the belly and the wrist, and he slumped to the floor beside his desk, motionless.

  Brent played dead, his eyes closed. He couldn’t see his friends. How can I get out of here? He couldn’t reach a phone. He knew he would die if he lay there much longer. Should I try to help the others? His mind raced as Barton began shooting other traders on the floor. Can I try to stop him? The sound of gunfire was making him sick to his stomach, but it hurt too much to puke.

  Meanwhile, Barton was methodically killing Brent’s customers and friends with dreadful precision. Despite walls of glass throughout the office, he never broke a single one with an errant shot. He moved purposefully through the room, shooting one gun and then the other before coolly reloading. One trader tried to run, and Barton shot him once in the back and a second time in the buttocks before he fell; he was dead before he hit the floor. Another just stood frozen in fear until Barton fatally shot him twice.

  FRIGHTENED PEOPLE RUN FROM AN OFFICE IN ATLANTA’S UPSCALE BUCKHEAD DISTRICT WHILE POLICE CROUCH BEHIND A VAN AFTER MARK BARTON OPENED FIRE IN TWO STOCK-TRADING FIRMS.

  Associated Press

  ONLOOKERS AND MEDIA RUSHED TO THE SCENE OF MARK BARTON’S RAMPAGE IN THE BUCKHEAD DISTRICT, BUT THE ANGRY DAY-TRADER WAS ALREADY LONG GONE WHEN THE NEWS BROKE.

  Getty Images

  Blood sprayed on the walls, the windows, the floor. Barton stood so close to many of his victims that he, too, was covered in their blood, but he was calm, even ghoulishly jovial.

  “I certainly hope this doesn’t ruin your trading day!” Barton hollered as he fired.

  The gravely wounded Doonan knew he could never overpower the massive Barton, who outweighed him by eighty pounds and was on a fanatical mission. Instead, he plotted his escape through a conference room door and away from the building to get help. He gathered his waning strength and rose to his feet, holding his stomach wound, blood spilling out of his gut shot through his fingers. Suddenly, Barton was standing in the office doorway, his back to Brent, still spraying the bloodied trading floor with bullets.

  What do I do now? Lie back down and play dead? Make a run for it?

  “I certainly hope this doesn’t ruin your trading

  day!” Barton hollered as he fired.

  The choice was made for him.

  At that moment, Brent watched Barton shoot a runner in the back, then raise his gun for an easier shot at a woman who had no place to run. Without thinking, Brent lunged through the door and shoulder-blocked Barton in the back. His shot barely missed the woman, but Barton regained his balance and fired twice at Brent, who was now running toward a new escape. One bullet hit his left arm and the other struck under his left shoulder blade, exploding out through the left side of his chest, but Brent was still on his feet and, inexplicably, Barton didn’t pursue him, perhaps thinking Brent—now shot four times—would slink off and die like a wounded animal.

  Brent reached the exterior hallway, where gun smoke hung in a fluorescent haze. He pinned one injured arm against the trickling hole in his belly as the other hung slack at his side, useless. He looked back. Where is Mark? Rapidly losing strength, he felt his way along the white walls, smearing a bloody trail as he struggled toward the door at the end of the fifty-foot hall, which was suddenly longer than he remembered. The stairwell door might as well have been a mile, a horrifying funhouse illusion in the distance.

  He couldn’t feel his legs, but Brent fled as fast as his wounds and flagging adrenaline would let him—so briskly that one of his shoes flew off—but time and space were out of sync. A monster lurked somewhere behind him, but he felt trapped in a phantasmic half-speed warp, unable to move quickly enough to save himself. Seconds elongated into hours …every inch felt like a thousand miles …sanctuary grew more distant as the color drained from the walls, the floor, the blood.

  Out of the gray light, another door miraculously appeared. The service elevator. Brent used every ounce of his strength to push through a heavy door into the elevator’s small vestibule and began to prod the button in an urgent frenzy. He heard the distant drone of the plodding car somewhere, and he glanced back at the door expecting to see Barton coming to finish him off.

  The sluggish elevator continued to hum, unhurried. Brent sunk to his knees and tried in vain to pry the elevator doors open.

  “Come on!” he seethed under his breath. “Come on!”

  In that moment, death touched him. He felt cold and doomed. This is it. I’m going to die in this little box and nobody will ever know until it’s too late.

  He dragged himself to the big vestibule door again to peek down the hall to see whether he had any time left. A panicked woman was running down the narrow hallway, and Brent began to motion her toward the modest safety of the elevator’s tiny, enclosed vestibule.

  But then Barton appeared behind her. He chased her and pointed one of his guns at the back of her head.

  Brent jumped back in fear. The listless elevator continued its endless whirring, still seemingly a thousand miles away.

  Oh God, oh God …please don’t let me die!

  One shot cracked.

  And the elevator door opened.

  Brent crawled into the elevator and frantically stabbed at all the buttons. After what seemed like a deadly eternity, the doors began to close.

  Then the vestibule door opened and Barton leaped inside. Brent saw him between the doors as they slowly slid together, and the killer raised his gun to fire.

  The doors met before he pulled the trigger.

  PRAYING FOR HELP

  The elevator rose slowly with Brent crouched on all fours inside. Blood dripped onto the floor and he could literally feel his life leaking away.

  The doors opened. Brent didn’t know where he was. He had pushed every button and couldn’t focus on the numbers that marked the floor. He rose to his unsteady feet and peeked around the corner at an empty hallway. He was relieved Barton hadn’t followed him, but he couldn’t dawdle. He was dying. If he could reach one of the nearby offices, he had a chance …to get help for the others …to call the police …to live. He stumbled to a nearby office and collapsed in the doorway, drained and bleeding profusely.

  “Help! Help me!” he shouted. “I’ve been shot!”

  Several workers ran to help him while somebody called 911.

  “Get me out of the doorway,” he begged. “Hide me! He’s after me and if he sees me we’re all dead!”

  The police dispatcher assured the shaken caller that help was already on the way. Tragically, confused first responders believed all the distress calls were for the shootings at Momentum Securities. Although calls were coming from All-Tech’s building, too, dispatchers and commanders insisted they were wrong, and more than a half hour passed before it dawned on police that there had been two mass shootings in two different places.

  Somebody ran to the break room for a roll of paper towels to stanch the bleeding, while another began to pray over
Brent, who was sinking fast. Blood pounded inside him as his heart worked to keep him alive. His skin felt seared, as if he had been pierced by a million white-hot needles, and his breathing grew shallow and painful.

  Three people pressed towels to Brent’s wounds, while someone stripped his bloody shirt away. Through the fog of pain and delirium, he saw horror splash across their faces as they saw what damage the bullets had done. It was a look that told him he was going to die.

  So he said what might have been a prayer—for Mark Barton. He tried to forgive his killer, who might have had a brain tumor, or forgot to take some vital medications, or was possessed by demons or—for God’s sake, stop! Dying people think like this, and I don’t want to die!

  Still no paramedics. Fifteen minutes had elapsed.

  “Where the heck are they?” he moaned weakly. Despite the compresses, blood continued to pool around him from eight different entrance and exit wounds.

  Another woman tending Brent’s wounds

  asked whether he had any medical conditions

  to worry about, and he said no.

  “Are you allergic to anything?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bullets.”

  “We don’t know,” a woman told him.

  “They’ve got to hurry or I’m not going to make it.”

  “We know,” she said, stroking his forehead. “Calm down. You’re going to be just fine.”

  Mortally wounded, Brent couldn’t wait for help that might not be coming. This might be his last chance to talk to his mother and father again.

  “Could you please call my father?” he asked one of the women. He gave her the number, and she went back somewhere inside the office.

  Another woman tending his wounds asked whether he had any medical conditions to worry about, and he said no.

  “Are you allergic to anything?” she asked.

  “Yeah,” he said. “Bullets.”

  Bad news, the woman with the phone said. “Your father’s out of town.”

  He whispered his mother’s number in her ear, but nobody answered there, either.

  He gave her his brother Brian’s work number, but Brian was also out of town on business.

  I’m going to die surrounded by total strangers, he thought.

  Still no medics. Minutes rolled by. Dispatchers assured them help was near.

  Then a phone rang. It was Brian. One of the women in the office told him what was happening and he asked to talk to Brent. But the cord was too short and the woman was forced to relay messages between the two brothers, who had been close all their lives but whose voices were now separated by a matter of a few feet.

  DAY-TRADING ENTREPRENEUR BRENT DOONAN WAS SHOT FOUR TIMES AND LOST HIS BODY’S ENTIRE BLOOD SUPPLY ON JULY 29, 1999, IN ATLANTA, WHEN HIS FRIEND MARK BARTON COMMITTED THE BLOODIEST WORKPLACE KILLING IN AMERICAN HISTORY.

  Courtesy of Brent Doonan

  “Brent, you hang on, buddy,” the woman spoke for Brian. “Don’t give up on me, dammit. Don’t you die! Do you hear me?”

  Brent whispered his message back to Brian.

  “Brian, I love you.” His voice began to wither. “Tell Mom and Dad how much I love them, too …”

  Brent’s skin was ashen and he had no discernible pulse. The roll of paper towels was nearly gone and still no ambulance.

  “What religion are you?” somebody asked.

  “I’m Catholic.”

  She began to recite the Lord’s Prayer and everyone—even Brent—joined her. Then they said a Hail Mary, but Brent’s brain was slowly shutting down. The words came out all wrong and everyone knew he was fading.

  THE SCOPE OF THE SLAUGHTER

  Mark Barton had slipped out of the building unnoticed. He’d simply packed his guns back in his duffel bag and walked out to his minivan in the parking lot—even as police were descending upon the carnage at Momentum across the street. He plopped his bag on the passenger seat and slowly melted away in the traffic on Piedmont.

  Forty minutes after he shot Brent Doonan in the belly and launched his assault on All-Tech, Barton was a ghost, and Brent was preparing to die, choking on his own fluids. Still no police. Still no EMTs.

  The office workers who had kept Brent alive so far knelt around him in prayer.

  “Lord, please take my angel and give him to Brent,” one of them said. “He needs all the angels he can get.”

  In that instant, they said later, they saw a shrouded spirit, maybe an angel, maybe an illusion caused by the suggestion of something divine.

  But Brent was still dying. The bullet that tore through his left side had clipped his lung, which was now filling with blood. Each breath became harder, and Brent felt as if he were submerged in a cold lake, breathing through a straw. Every time he breathed out, his own warm blood rose in his mouth and nose.

  Suddenly, a startling fifty minutes after Barton’s first shot into Brent’s gut, paramedics burst into the room. As they hooked up IVs, one of them yelled for a pack of cigarettes. He stripped the plastic wrapping off and used it to seal Brent’s wounds because they had run out of proper patches treating the wounded downstairs in the butchery formerly known as All-Tech’s trading floor. Down there and elsewhere in the building, they’d found five corpses and at least six wounded.

  SINCE MARK BARTON’S DEADLY 1999 RAMPAGE, BRENT DOONAN HAS WRITTEN A BOOK, MARRIED, MOVED HOME TO KANSAS TO HELP WITH HIS FAMILY’S TRUCK-SALES BUSINESS, AND HAD A SON, JAXSON.

  Ron Franscell

  Then a tall man crouched between the medics on the office floor and laid his hand across Brent’s aching shoulder.

  “Son, I’m Dr. Harvey. I’m a trauma surgeon,” he said. “Listen to me. If you keep your eyes open you will live. If you close them, you die.”

  The doc told paramedics Brent’s chances were fifty-fifty and that he might not even make it to the ambulance. He’d lost too much blood and was starting to convulse. But they loaded him up, and Brent was finally on his way to the hospital.

  For most of his life, Brent had prayed for a happy death. Now he pleaded his case to God that this was not how it should end.

  By the time Brent’s ambulance was racing to the hospital, police knew who they were hunting. But they had no idea where Mark Barton had gone. Authorities launched one of the largest manhunts in Georgia history, sealing off Atlanta and blocking the state line. His name and face were plastered all over the local news, but Barton remained an elusive phantom. Critical hours passed as the true scope of his slaughter seeped into the city.

  Barton had fired thirty-nine shots at Momentum and All-Tech. He hit twenty-two people. Nine of them died. Seven hovered near death in Atlanta hospitals. Compounding the horror, police had also found the bludgeoned bodies of his wife and two children in the Stockbridge apartment, along with an ominous promise to “kill as many” of his enemies as he could.

  Twelve people were dead and a deranged killer was still on the loose. Although nobody had yet done the math, it was already the second deadliest workplace shooting in American history and one of the country’s twenty worst mass murders.

  Police simply didn’t know whether he was finished.

  Just before sunset on that day, a strange man casually walked up to a woman getting into her car in the parking lot of a shopping mall in the Atlanta suburb of Kennesaw, more than 15 miles (24 kilometers) from the carnage in Buckhead.

  “Don’t scream or I’ll shoot you,” he warned.

  But she ran back into the mall as another woman watched Barton get back into his green minivan. She recognized him from the news and called police.

  Within minutes, unmarked cruisers were tailing Barton’s van. They surmised he was looking to steal a car to make another ingenious getaway.

  Then Barton’s van turned into a gas station in suburban Acworth and circled slowly. But he’d made his last mistake. Police cars had blocked both exits. Barton stopped as more police cruisers and news crews descended on the spot where he was boxed in.

  A cop on a
bullhorn thundered orders at Barton, who sat trancelike in his driver seat. “Open the door very slowly and throw out your gun. Then climb out and lie facedown on the pavement!”

  No response.

  “Barton, throw out your weapon and get out of the van!”

  Nothing.

  Barton was cornered. He had no place to go. The phalanx of cops surrounding him could afford to wait him out.

  A single gunshot.

  Barton was obsessed with escape, and he had done it one more time. With the Glock at his right temple and the Colt at his left, he’d intended to fire both at the same time, but only one went off. It tore off the back of his skull and splattered his brains all over the van’s ceiling. On the seat beside him was his arsenal, some loose antidepressant pills, a cell phone, and a considerable amount of cash. In his glove box was a copy of his new will, in which he left everything to his mother and expressed a wish to be buried next to the two children he had just murdered.

  CORNERED IN HIS HEADLONG RUSH TO ELUDE POLICE AFTER THE SHOOTINGS AT TWO DAYTRADING OFFICES, MASS-MURDERER MARK BARTON SHOT HIMSELF IN HIS FAMILY VAN AT AN ATLANTA-AREA GAS STATION.

  Associated Press

  On the day Mark Barton killed twelve people then blew his own brains out, the Dow dropped one hundred eighty points and they called it a bloodbath.

  GOING NASDAQ

  At the same moment Mark Barton’s brain was disintegrating, surgeons were piecing Brent Doonan back together.

  His abdominal cavity had filled with 7 pints (3 liters) of lost blood. One-third of his liver had been blown away and was bleeding unchecked. His spleen had exploded. A rib was smashed. His diaphragm was a sieve. Part of his left lung was irreparably damaged. His pulse was so weak that the surgeon was literally squeezing his heart to keep it beating.

  And beneath his right eye ran a raw furrow left by a .45-caliber slug that missed being his fifth serious wound by less than the depth of his skin.