Friday 30 July 1999
Gunman kills 12 after watching shares plummet
By Ben Fenton in Washington
12 dead in shooting rampage [29 Jul '99] - Access Atlanta
AN irate investor shot dead at least nine people in stockbrokers' offices in Atlanta, Georgia, last night after killing his wife and two children. Hours later he was cornered by police 30 miles from the city in his green getaway van and shot himself.
Mark Barton, 44, a chemist, had gone on the rampage with two large-calibre handguns after apparently losing money on the Internet. A witness said he told the brokers as he walked in wearing shorts: "I hope this doesn't ruin your trading day." He then opened fire. Twelve other people were injured, seven with gunshot wounds and the others as they tried to escape.
Mayor Bill Campbell, of Atlanta, said that Barton had been involved in day-trading, a form of stockbroking in which self-taught investors buy and sell stocks and shares on the Internet. The shooting, the latest in a long series of mass killings in America, coincided with a sharp drop on the New York stock exchange.
Police said that Barton's family were found dead in a flat in the suburb of Stockbridge, about 15 miles south of the city, by people hoping to rent the property. A note had been left at the scene. Police believe that the killings could have taken place several days ago.
Barton was said to have no criminal record. But six years ago his former wife Debra and her mother, Eloise Spivey, were found hacked to death at a camping site in Alabama. Two months before the deaths he had taken out a £400,000 life insurance policy on Debra, to whom he had been married for 15 years.
Despite strong suspicions by the police, he was never charged and took custody of their children, Matthew, now 10, and eight-year-old Shelly. The scene of yesterday's shootings was an office complex called the Georgia Security Centre in the Buckhead financial district of Atlanta. First Barton, 6ft 4in tall, walked into the offices of Alltech Investments at 3500 Piedmont Road, where he shot four people.
Mayor Campbell said: "Witnesses said those who have identified Mr Barton say that he went in, was standing around and then saw the market going down and started shooting. "We have no idea that he had even sustained losses. We have been told that he had fairly substantial swings up and down in his day-trading."
Police with guns drawn escorted terrified workers out floor by floor as they scoured the building for the killer. Dozens of ambulances pulled up outside the building and hospitals were put on the highest alert. Witnesses described seeing bodies on the floor of offices and paramedics giving assistance to badly injured people lying in pools of blood.
Harvey Houtkin, the chief executive of Alltech Investments, said that Barton shot the office manager and secretary at point-blank range. Mr Houtkin, who is based in New Jersey, said that he had been speaking on the telephone to a customer who had been in the office at the time of the shooting.
"I was told this guy was just shooting at people as they were sitting there. I am having a hard time coming to grips with what's happening here. You normally just hear it on the news. I was told he had gone into an office and there were sounds of the argument. The door of that office flew open, this man came out and went on a shooting spree around the rest of the office. Dealing with the stock market is hard enough, but this is something else."
John Cabrer, who works in an office next door, told an Atlanta television station saw three people who appeared to be dead and four others who were wounded. "I tried to revive one of them, but then I realised he was gone, so I went to the man who was still conscious on the floor and I called his wife for him."
After the first killings, Barton ran across the road to number 3525 Piedmont, the offices of Momentum Securities Inc, which claims to be the largest electronic day trading operator in America. He was still carrying both guns.
Charles Carter, who also works in a nearby office, said he saw a middle-aged man lying on his side with blood streaming from a wound in his side. "There were paramedics tending other people on the ground, but they weren't looking at him, so I suppose that they figured he was already past helping."
Another witness, Chris Carter, said that as police escorted him out, he saw a man's body on the floor. "They weren't attending to him, which led me to believe he was dead." Scott Belazi, who works on the third floor of the building, said: "The police got us out of there. We saw a bunch of blood in the leasing office." Early today several of the wounded were critical.
Last month a psychiatrist in Michigan was killed by his former patient, who also shot a 45-year-old woman and injured four other people. He killed himself. In April a 71-year-old man raked the first floor of the Mormon history library in Salt Lake City with a .22 pistol, killing two people before police shot him.
Three months earlier one person was killed and another wounded when a man walked into a Salt Lake City office with a grocery sack of bullets and fired.
