Atlanta Stops to Reflect on Recent Mass Shootings

The city ground to a halt at midday Wednesday as leaders of this bustling, fractious urban center issued a call for unity and denounced violence in memory of the victims of the worst mass shootings in its recent history.

“An entire city desperately wants to know, why do bad things happen to good people, why no one, including our innocent children, is immune from the evil of violence,” Mayor Bill Campbell said during a memorial service at the Peachtree Road United Methodist Church.

Traffic slowed and business stopped in much of Atlanta to mark a moment of silence in honor of the victims.

Last Thursday, stock market day trader Mark Orrin Barton, who had already killed his wife and two children, went to an office complex in Atlanta’s Buckhead financial district and opened fire at All-Tech Investment Group and Momentum Securities Inc., killing nine people and wounding 13.

Nine of Barton’s victims remained hospitalized Wednesday, including two in critical condition.

Barton, 44, killed himself later that day as police approached his van.

He reportedly had losses of about $400,000 at All-Tech and $105,000 at Momentum.

According to a published report, Barton had received a “margin call,” a request to put up money to make up for losses, at All-Tech in April, but it is not known if he left that brokerage for Momentum because of the call.

Harvey I. Houtkin, All-Tech’s chairman and CEO, said in an interview this week that “the guys he shot had lent him some money for calls” in the past.

It is customary at some day-trading houses for clients to lend each other money to cover margin calls, but the practice is still being studied by the Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Assn. of Securities Dealers. Regulators, according to reports, are concerned that investors may not understand the potential risks of the loans.

Wednesday’s memorial service also commemorated other Atlanta victims, including two police officers slain in Cobb County, just outside the city limits, by a gunman who also killed himself.

And just 17 days before Barton’s rampage, Cyrano Marks killed his girlfriend, her four children and her sister at his girlfriend’s Atlanta home before turning the gun on himself.

Campbell noted that Atlanta was only the latest U.S. city to be hit by such mass violence. One of the worst was an April rampage in which two teenage boys killed 15 people, including themselves, at a Colorado high school.

“Whether in Littleton, Colo., in a home in southwest Atlanta, an office building in Buckhead, violence continues to cast a shadow over our nation. This year the shadow has touched Atlanta like never before,” said Campbell, a staunch proponent of gun control.

The spate of killings tarnished the image of a city that prides itself as the capital of the “New South” and center of the civil rights movement.

The month of bloodshed made an unwelcome change in one trend in the city of 400,000, reversing what had been a steadily falling murder rate. The two mass killings in July brought the city’s homicide rate to 92 for the first seven months of 1999, compared with 83 for the same period in 1998.