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

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.
    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. Hisformer 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.
    â€œThe 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