ATLANTA -- A securities day trader killed nine people yesterday afternoon in two office buildings in the city's upscale Buckhead district, eluded an extensive police manhunt for five hours, then killed himself in his van after the police pulled him over in nearby Cobb County.
Twelve other people were injured in the incidents, seven of them from gunshot wounds.
The man, Mark O. Barton, 44, also is suspected in the killings of his wife and two children from an earlier marriage, whose bodies were found yesterday in an apartment in suburban Stockbridge, about 15 miles southeast of Atlanta.
A 9 mm pistol and a .45-caliber handgun were found near Barton's body and a computer-generated letter and three notes were found near the bodies of his wife and children, authorities said.
The Stockbridge killings took place before the Buckhead shootings, but it was unclear exactly when, said Mayor Bill Campbell of Atlanta.
Seven of those injured in the Buckhead shootings were in critical condition at Atlanta hospitals late yesterday.
Barton, a chemist who took on the high-risk life of an independent stock trader, also was a suspect in the bludgeoning deaths of his first wife and her mother in Cedar Bluff, Ala., in 1993, authorities said. He was never charged in those killings.
No motive was known for yesterday's killings, the deadliest shooting rampage in the city's history, but investigators speculated that recent trading losses contributed to Barton's rage, although they also said he had not expressed any such motive in the notes he left behind.
"What happened today is a tragedy of massive proportions," Campbell said yesterday afternoon, his face locked in a sweat-dampened grimace. "We are praying for the families and praying for our city."
Yesterday's incident was the third shooting rampage in the Atlanta area in less than three months. On May 20, a 15-year-old student at Heritage High School in nearby Conyers shot six other students, none of them fatally. On July 12, an Atlanta man killed six members of a family and himself in an apparent domestic dispute.
The shootings in the Buckhead business and entertainment district yesterday began about 2: 50 p.m., when Barton walked into Momentum Securities and, without warning or provocation, began to fire with two weapons, Campbell said.
Four people were killed in that building.
James Lee, a co-owner of the firm, would not say whether Barton did business there.
Barton then crossed bustling Piedmont Road and walked into another brokerage firm, All-Tech Investment Group. He opened fire there as well, killing five people.
Barton had traded at the office in the past but not recently, the company said in a statement released from its headquarters in Montvale, N.J.
Barton "came into our office and after speaking to the branch manager, suddenly stood up and for no apparent reason opened fire on the branch manager and his secretary,"said the statement from All-Tech. "This man then went into our main trading room and began indiscriminately shooting at our customers. The man then ran out of our office and continued shooting in another part of the office building."
Workers in the office buildings described blood-splattered walls, lifeless bodies and nervous police officers shortly after the shootings. Many were locked in their offices for hours as heavily armed officers swept through the buildings, their weapons drawn as they looked for Barton.
Dari A. Payrow, 23, a worker at Allegiance Telecom, which has offices on the third floor of the building that houses All-Tech, said he was returning to his office from a bathroom when he saw a trickle of blood in the hall. He glanced through the glass windows of the building's leasing office, which is next to his own, and saw puddles of blood on the floor next to the receptionist's desk.
"There was a guy on the floor and nobody was helping him so I assume he was dead," he said.
Periodically, police escorted office workers out of the building and led them down Piedmont Road. Many jogged to safety, then bided their time in a nearby Mexican restaurant, calming their nerves with margaritas and bottled beer while using cellular telephones to notify family members and friends of their safety.
For confused hours after the shootings, police seemed to have few clues to Barton's whereabouts or his method of escape. Aided by SWAT teams, dogs and helicopters, they conducted a suite-by-suite search of the office buildings and the leafy grounds surrounding them to no avail.
After officials broadcast a description of Barton's van, Cobb County police officers saw him driving north on Interstate 75, said Lt. Lee Schwein of the Acworth police.
As Barton exited at Acworth, Schwein said, Acworth police cruisers converged on him. He then pulled into a BP service station and officers blocked his escape.
He pulled to the back of the station, put two guns to his head and fired, Schwein said.
"This brings a very tragic day to an end," Campbell said about 8: 20 p.m., after returning to a bank of microphones near the scene of the shootings. "I don't know if any of us can understand why something like this occurs. All we can do is comfort the families and pray for our city."
In the apartment in Stockbridge, police said they found the bodies of Barton's children in their beds. Notes had been placed atop each body. Henry County Police Chief Jimmy Mercer said that Barton's wife was found in a bedroom closet, also covered, with a note. Another letter, apparently written by Barton on a computer, was found in the living room.
Mercer said that police believed that Barton's wife, Leigh Ann, 27, was killed Tuesday and his children on Wednesday. He said the notes suggested that the victims died as a result of "blunt-force trauma." He also said the notes mentioned the killings in Alabama, but not in the form of a confession.
"It's almost written in a denial phase," he said.
He did not say whether the notes specifically warned of yesterday's shootings, but he said, "There may be reason to believe that this mayhem would not stop at this particular point."
Henry County police said they found a list in the carnage of the Stockbridge apartment that indicated he intended to kill at least three more people.
Because the killings of Barton's family members -- including a 12-year-old son, Matthew, and a 7-year-old daughter, Elizabeth Mychelle -- took place before the Buckhead shootings, Campbell warned that it was dangerous to assume that yesterday's market fluctuations had triggered the attacks.
But the mayor did say that police had learned that Barton's investments had "substantial swings, losses and gains" and that Barton "seemed to indicate some concern about losses."
Authorities said that the killings six years ago came after his wife, Debra Spivey Barton, 35, apparently discovered he was having an affair. She and her mother were hacked to death at an Alabama campground.
After the killings, a judge in Douglas County, Ga., where Barton lived at the time, ordered him to undergo a psychological evaluation in a custody case involving his two young children.
The results "to this day make me shudder," said David McDade, the Douglas County district attorney, who has reviewed the case. "They indicated to us that he was certainly capable" of committing the murders.
Barton's lawyer, Michael Hauptman, told a local Atlanta TV news reporter yesterday that Barton recently won a $600,000 settlement from an insurance company that had refused to pay his wife's life-insurance policy.
Hauptman described Barton as "very, very quiet" and "very gentle," a man who "cared about his children, cared, quite frankly, about his wife's murder and his mother-in-law."
Bill Spivey of Lithia Springs, Ga., husband and father of those victims, said last night: "The man who it appears killed my wife and daughter, also killed my two grandchildren. It's almost too much for me to deal with, that my grandchildren too are dead."
Cox News Service contributed to this article.
The suspect, the trail
Mark Orrin Barton
Age: 44
Occupation: Day trader and chemist
Family: Wife, Leigh Ann, and children, Elizabeth Mychelle and Matthew, were found bludgeoned to death yesterday