Free Delivered from Evil: True Stories of Ordinary People Who Faced Monstrous Mass Killers and Survived by Ron Franscell

office.
    Another woman tending his wounds asked whether he had any medical conditions to worry about, and he said no.
    â€œAre you allergic to anything?” she asked.
    â€œYeah,” 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
    â€œBrent, 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.
    â€œBrian, 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.
    â€œWhat religion are you?” somebody asked.
    â€œI’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.
    â€œLord, 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