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

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