Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived (9 page)

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.