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

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 spree—Brent Doonan wheeled out of the hospital into a different life.
    THE LAST ESCAPE
    On the first day of Brent’s new life, as he was recuperating at his parents’ home in Kansas, he was sued by the widow of an All-Tech victim. She claimed the company had failed to foresee a predictable meltdown by a distraught day trader. A dozen more suits would follow. Eventually, all of the lawsuits would be dismissed, but they hung over Brent for six years, and the legal entanglements prevented him from making the apologies he desperately wanted to speak to the families of his customers and friends.
    Mark Barton continued to haunt him, too, mostly in nightmares, where he once saw Barton standing at the foot of his bed, aiming a gun at him.
    After a couple months of rest, Brent went back to work at All-Tech, but even being in the refurbished offices—where the blood stains had been scrubbed, the bullet holes patched, and the carpets removed—made him ill. He developed panic attacks to accompany his lingering guilt. Worse, the markets were in a historic swoon, and All-Tech was hemorrhaging cash. Bills were piling up.
    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.
    The only bright spot came at Christmas, when Brent was set up on a blind date with Sarah Poe, a beautiful, polished, athletic nurse from Augusta. They hit it off, and soon he was spending his weekends with her in Augusta, away from the city and away from the memories. For six months, she didn’t know about Barton’s attack, partly because the only time he felt truly relieved of all his demons was with her, partly because he didn’t want to relive it.
    In the fall of 2000, Brent was done with All-Tech. He sold his interest in All-Tech to his partner, Scott Manspeaker, who had also recovered from his wounds. Brent invested in a new online real-estate venture, but it tanked, taking nearly his every last dime. At the end of the day, he had almost nothing left, except Sarah and his family.
    And that was enough.
    By the time they married in the fall of 2001, day-trading was dead. His old life was dead. Mark Barton was dead. Brent and Sarah moved home to Kansas, the source of his strength, back to where he belonged. They got work, built a new life, and soon had a son, Jaxson, who quickly became the center of Brent’s universe.
    He also spent a year writing a book about his fateful encounter with Mark Barton. Murder at the Office was published in 2006—just one year before the Virginia Tech shootings—to