Delivered from Evil

by Ron Franscell

  For four and a half hours, surgeons worked to save Brent’s life. Each time they plugged one bleeding hole, another showed itself. He’d lost twelve units of blood—his body’s entire blood supply—and he was still alive.

  Once out of surgery, he was hooked up to life support. Doctors left a 5-inch (12.7 cm)–wide hole in his side to let an infection drain. His raw, suppurating wounds were pinned together with more than three hundred stitches and staples. A tenacious fever spiked at 103°F (39°C). The slugs had damaged several nerves, maybe permanently. For several days, he flinched at every shadow, every sudden movement, every waking dream. Night terrors gripped him, and he often awoke in a cold sweat.

  Mark Barton still haunted him. The killer was dead, his family told him, but Brent asked again and again about him.

  Five days after the shooting, Brent’s father brought a copy of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, in which a story on page eight detailed the cremation of Mark Barton in a country crematorium far from the city, far from Brent. His former in-laws had forbidden his last wish to be buried beside his children, who were buried in the same plot as their mother and Barton’s first wife (and likely victim) Debra, so his ashes—if not his soul—were without a home.

  “The bastard won’t have to wait to get to hell,” Brent’s father said. “They already burned him.”

  It comforted Brent to know Barton wouldn’t hurt anyone anymore, but he was freighted with guilt. Why didn’t he see Barton’s threat coming? Why didn’t he jump on Barton when he had the chance? Why did he run? If he’d been a bigger man, a better man, would he have done something different? He replayed the whole sad movie over and over again in his troubled mind.

  From that day forward, though, his physical condition slowly improved. Georgia governor Roy Barnes visited, reporters lurked around every corner, and thousands of well-wishers sent flowers, cards, and letters.

  Even the boss of the Texas chemical company who had fired Barton so many years ago came to visit. He apologized to Brent for “letting Barton off the hook” after he had stolen company secrets. “But yesterday is gone,” he told Brent. “All we have to do is work on today and tomorrow.”

  The man’s words made him feel better, but Brent was still consumed with guilt. He asked the hospital staff to deliver all his flowers to the graves of Barton’s victims. And he visited Scott and the permanently blinded Kathy—whose last vision was the face of Mark Barton—in their rooms, looking for answers, making apologies, fumbling around for the right words.

  While Brent was on the mend, the North American Securities Administrators Association issued a critical report on day-trading that said nine out of every ten day traders lose everything. The Wall Street Journal published an article calling it “a lifestyle that is a petri dish for neuroses.” Regular traders took to calling the occasional psychotic outburst in down markets “going NASDAQ.”

  On August 8, 1999, Brent celebrated his twenty-sixth birthday in a hospital room, surrounded by his family. Had he not been so young, so healthy, and so determined, he would have never seen this day.

  Five days later—two weeks after Mark Barton shot him and killed twelve people in an insane spree—Brent Doonan wheeled out of the hospital into a different life.

  THE LAST ESCAPE

  On the first day of Brent’s new life, as he was recuperating at his parents’ home in Kansas, he was sued by the widow of an All-Tech victim. She claimed the company had failed to foresee a predictable meltdown by a distraught day trader. A dozen more suits would follow. Eventually, all of the lawsuits would be dismissed, but they hung over Brent for six years, and the legal entanglements prevented him from making the apologies he desperately wanted to speak to the families of his customers and friends.

  Mark Barton continued to haunt him, too, mostly in nightmares, where he once saw Barton standing at the foot of his bed, aiming a gun at him.

  After a couple months of rest, Brent went back to work at All-Tech, but even being in the refurbished offices—where the blood stains had been scrubbed, the bullet holes patched, and the carpets removed—made him ill. He developed panic attacks to accompany his lingering guilt. Worse, the markets were in a historic swoon, and All-Tech was hemorrhaging cash. Bills were piling up.

  On August 8, 1999, Brent celebrated his

  twenty-sixth birthday in a hospital room,

  surrounded by his family. Had he not been

  so young, so healthy, and so determined,

  he would have never seen this day.

  The only bright spot came at Christmas, when Brent was set up on a blind date with Sarah Poe, a beautiful, polished, athletic nurse from Augusta. They hit it off, and soon he was spending his weekends with her in Augusta, away from the city and away from the memories. For six months, she didn’t know about Barton’s attack, partly because the only time he felt truly relieved of all his demons was with her, partly because he didn’t want to relive it.

  In the fall of 2000, Brent was done with All-Tech. He sold his interest in All-Tech to his partner, Scott Manspeaker, who had also recovered from his wounds. Brent invested in a new online real-estate venture, but it tanked, taking nearly his every last dime. At the end of the day, he had almost nothing left, except Sarah and his family.

  And that was enough.

  By the time they married in the fall of 2001, day-trading was dead. His old life was dead. Mark Barton was dead. Brent and Sarah moved home to Kansas, the source of his strength, back to where he belonged. They got work, built a new life, and soon had a son, Jaxson, who quickly became the center of Brent’s universe.

  He also spent a year writing a book about his fateful encounter with Mark Barton. Murder at the Office was published in 2006—just one year before the Virginia Tech shootings—to scant notice, but it purged some of Brent’s demons.

  He wanted to forgive. Himself, as much as Barton. He wanted to give Barton, in death, more of a chance than Barton had given twelve people. He began to see every day since July 29, 1999, as a “freebie.” When his friends complained about a bad day at work, Brent laughed.

  “I wanted to show you could go through a day or week from hell and come back,” he said.

  For Barton’s part, nobody yet knows what caused his deadly implosion. Many blithely blamed the stresses of day-trading for his collapse, although the evidence points to a complex and long-standing series of psychoses, behaviors, and events that probably had a much more profound influence on Mark Barton. Day-trading might have been more of a symptom than a cause of his catastrophic flameout. His rage might just as easily have resulted from his loss of control over his life, which his stock-market losses most certainly symbolized.

  Barton’s psychopathic tendencies showed themselves long before he discovered day-trading: his youthful criminal fantasies; his dysfunctional work life; his mask of intellect, humor, and charm; his remorseless, calculated response to accusations of grave criminal behavior, including the hyper-brutal bludgeoning of his wife and mother-in-law; even the killing of a family cat. All that—and more—pointed to a much more deeply disturbed, explosive psychopath, not a momentarily angry good guy who snapped over financial problems.

  Was he, as one Newsweek writer suggested, a symbol of the angry American male, a victim of a telemarketed, outsourced economy that forced him to gamble on abstractions and put him at the mercy of distant events and corporations? Take a look in the cultural mirror, the article suggested, and see “a man in a room alone—isolated from his fellows, unneeded by his family, staring into a computer screen on which he seeks a disembodied fortune or, if that fortune fails, types a suicide note.”

  Or had he lapsed back into a paranoid and frighteningly nihilistic religious fanaticism in which the wicked “system of things” had to be eliminated? Although somewhat less likely as a root cause, some experts have pointed to Barton’s earlier retreat into strange zealotry as evidence of the possibility.

  But nobody knows, and nobody ever will. Maybe all those things. Maybe none. Mar
k Barton, it seems, has eluded understanding, his last ingenious escape.

  Doonan doesn’t speak Barton’s name, and he

  wishes fervently that no killer’s name will ever

  become more familiar than any victim’s.

  Today, Doonan supervises the finance and insurance branch of his father’s truck dealership in Wichita, a business his grandfather started decades before. He still sometimes dreams about that day in Atlanta, but less and less as time passes. When he’s in public, he watches people more intently. Every day, his fingers tingle from lingering nerve damage, but he plays with his son as if he were a child, too.

  He never questioned the existence of God, but he wasn’t so sure about miracles until he survived Mark Barton’s rampage.

  Like everyone else, he still doesn’t know why it happened. He no longer weighs himself down with those questions because, he says, “someday I’ll find out.” Until then, he doesn’t speak Barton’s name, and he wishes fervently that no killer’s name will ever become more familiar than any victim’s.

  “The choice, as with all things in life, is ours; to become a survivor or a victim,” he wrote in Murder at the Office. “Just for today, I will be unafraid…. We are simply part of nature anyway. Nature is the sum of creation. From the Big Bang to the whole shebang. It’s making snow forts, it’s spring moving north at about thirteen miles a day, emotions both savage and blessed, the harvest moon, fat rainbows, the courtship tunes of birds, the sparkle in the eye of a person you love, a new leaf struggling to move the earth skyward in your garden, a shaft of bright warm summer light spilling over my shoulder as I read a good book, a call out of the blue from someone I love, my dogs licking my cheeks, my son giving dad a big hug.”

  ENSENADA WAS ALREADY A DISTANT DREAM to Keith and Matao. The beach town lay only 70 miles (113 kilometers) behind them down old Mexico 1, but it might as well have been another universe. The week of vacation with Matao’s relatives at their little trailer, with the fish, the fireworks, Matao’s first kiss, the scorpion they captured in a jelly jar, the sea, the cliffs, the pirate beaches, that breathtaking blowhole, the sunsets …now it was all sucked up and exhaled in a squalid breath of exhaust, car horns, and dry July heat. The highway along the edge of Baja’s glossy sea had given way to a desert dotted with the rusting hulks of Ford Fairlanes and VW Buses abandoned among the ocotillos, and then to the electric, dirty, smoky, scary chaos of Tijuana’s panting streets, full of loud, smelly traffic and sweaty vendors hustling velvet Jesuses, or a cure for cancer, or unspeakable acts nobody should see.

  But Keith and Matao were just little boys and hadn’t seen anything yet.

  Although he was twelve, Keith Thomas had never had a friend like Matao Herrera. They shared a little boy’s passion for toy soldiers, drawing fantastic pictures, baseball, Star Wars, and pretending to be heroes on magnificent quests in the backyard.

  Keith’s mom and dad had been divorced for years, and his mom worked hard to keep her son fed and clothed, but she was gone a lot. She’d already been married three times before Keith was in fifth grade. And there were boyfriends, too. Keith was on his own much of the time until his mom took a new job as a telephone operator in the little Los Angeles suburb of Orange. On his first day of second grade in a new school, the teacher assigned the blond and freckle-faced Keith to show this playful little half-Mexican kid wearing a Yoda T-shirt around. Keith knew he’d like any kid who’d wear a Yoda T-shirt. They bonded instantly and became inseparable, two halves of the same whole.

  MATAO AND BLYTHE HERRERA, SHOWN HERE IN A FAMILY SNAPSHOT, HUNKERED IN FEAR BENEATH THEIR TABLE WITH RON HERRERA AND KEITH THOMAS ON JULY 18, 1984, WHEN AN ANGRY JAMES HUBERTY OPENED FIRE ON DOZENS OF INNOCENT DINERS IN A SAN YSIDRO, CALIFORNIA, MCDONALD’S.

  Courtesy of Keith Martens

  Before Matao, Keith’s existence was a blur. He moved around a lot. He remembered a goldfish dying, and some of the men, good and bad, with whom his mom fell in love. There was an imaginary friend, a cricket. And he recalled getting his first picture Bible as a gift and asking a lot of questions about God, but not much more stuck.

  Matao’s parents, Ron and Blythe Herrera, were just thirtysomething hippies who had fallen in love in high school. He worked as a precision inspector for an oil company, and she was the consummate earth mother. They came to treat Keith like their own kid, feeding him and including him in everything they did. Their little bungalow was small, but they knew Keith’s house was empty. Keith loved Blythe’s alfalfa-sprout sandwiches so much that he’d trade his hot school lunch to Matao for them. If he loved Matao like a brother, then he loved Blythe like another mother.

  For four years, they spent so much time together that Matao’s parents, Ron and Blythe, had invited Keith to tag along with Matao on this Mexican vacation and family reunion. It was a brilliant trip: For a week, the boys made their own adventures in the old fishing village of Ensenada, and everybody was happy. Now heading north toward the border, they were crawling through Tijuana, lining up to go through the tiny gap between Mexico and California, the always-clogged U.S. port of entry at Tijuana’s San Ysidro Transit Center, the busiest border crossing in the world. It was midafternoon on a Wednesday, so the traffic was already congealing at the gates as north-bound travelers scurried to get to California before rush hour on San Diego’s swarming freeways.

  In the stinking stop-and-go, Keith pulled his Ensenada visor lower and studied the shining bracelet Matao had given him. It was a chain with a small silver plate bearing Matao’s name, his school ID. Keith’s mother had moved again, so they would be attending sixth grade in different schools in the fall, and the bracelet was a reminder of their friendship.

  Keith felt like part of a family, and it made him smile so much his face ached. But although the holiday had been magical, Keith wanted to see his mother and ride his bike and just be home.

  After what seemed like a lifetime in the mid-July heat and dirty air, the American border guards eyed Ron Herrera’s car, asked a few questions, and finally waved him through. The Mexican asphalt suddenly blossomed into a sleek, six-lane interstate freeway in the poor San Diego suburb known as San Ysidro, a stepchild district of one of the nation’s most prosperous big cities. Still, San Ysidro was a few steps up from Tijuana, and the sunlight softened into the pastel shades of California, like waking up on the other side of the rainbow. The roadsides were suddenly familiar again, with American hotel marquees, franchise brake shops, and billboards in English.

  It wasn’t hunger as much as a craving for American food that made them want to stop somewhere for a late lunch.

  About a mile up I-5 from the border, they spied the golden arches of a McDonald’s and got off the freeway onto San Ysidro Boulevard, the main drag. It was just before 4 p.m., and the restaurant’s parking lot, between a doughnut shop and a post office, was already crowded with the early dinner rush, everyone apparently deserving a break today at the same moment. The place was packed with about fifty people.

  Inside, Ron and Blythe took the boys’ orders—Keith loved these new things called Chicken McNuggets with sweet-and-sour sauce and fries—before they scampered into the PlayPlace, where other children were already cavorting. A few minutes later, carrying their loaded trays of fast food, Ron and Blythe took a corner booth inside the restaurant near the play area, where the hungry boys quickly joined them. Blythe sat beside Matao on one side, Ron beside Keith on the other, with their backs to the kitchen and counter area. As they tore into their burgers and fries, they laughed and talked about their dreamy days in Ensenada.

  A YOUNG BOY LIES DEAD BESIDE HIS BICYCLE OUTSIDE THE SAN YSIDRO MCDONALD’S, ONE OF TWENTY-ONE PEOPLE KILLED BY GUNMAN JAMES HUBERTY.

  Associated Press

  A blast shattered their reverie into a million pieces.

  There had been many fireworks in Ensenada, and Keith thought someone had set off a big firecracker. He turned to look toward the front of the restaurant where the sound had erupted but only saw frighten
ed people ducking down as a deep and angry male voice boomed, “Everybody down!”

  Keith slid down beneath the table with Matao and his parents as the room exploded in an endless shudder of deafening bursts. Blythe screamed and began to cry. Keith had never heard anything as horrifying as the earsplitting rake of semiautomatic gunfire, much less in the confined, peaceful spaces of a neighborhood McDonald’s. Everything was upside down.

  Under the seat and against the wall, shielded by Ron, Keith couldn’t see anything except parts of other terrified people hiding under the next table and the camouflaged pants of a man walking deliberately, just feet away. The thundering continued amid shouts and screams.

  “What’s happening?” he asked.

  “Be still!” Ron commanded him. The fear in his voice scared Keith. “Don’t move!”

  Blythe screamed again. She hunkered at Keith’s feet, and Matao was balled up beside her, next to the aisle. She could peer between the seats and the table.

  “He’s coming down the aisle shooting everybody!”

  Keith turned his face to the wall and closed his eyes.

  He no longer wanted to see what might be coming. He already knew.

  He was about to die.

  SLAUGHTER

  Just before 4 p.m., a balding man dressed in camouflaged jungle pants, combat boots, a dark maroon T-shirt, and sunglasses pushed a mother and child out of his way as he entered the San Ysidro McDonald’s, set his canvas bag on the floor, and unzipped an ungodly arsenal of weapons and ammunition. James Oliver Huberty calmly fired a shotgun into the ceiling to get people’s attention, then set to the task of killing everyone he saw.

  Fresh from shopping and hungry for a fish sandwich, Jackie Wright Reyes—pregnant and cradling her eight-month-old baby, Carlos, in her arms—stood at the counter with a friend and some children. They had just gotten their order when Huberty fired and commanded everyone to get on the floor. Huddled on the cold tile with everyone else, Jackie shielded Carlos and her eleven-year-old niece, Aurora Pena, the best she could, but the man just looked down on them and started shooting.