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

aching shoulder.
    â€œSon, 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.
    â€œDon’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.
    â€œBarton, 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