Doonan was the co-owner of an Atlanta day trading firm in 1999 when one of his customers strolled into his office displaying a strange grin. The man, Mark Barton, then pulled out two pistols from his waistband before methodically shooting Doonan and others while bellowing, “I hope this doesn’t ruin your trading day.”
Barton would later commit suicide, but not before he shot and killed nine people and injured 13 more to become one of the nation’s most notorious mass murderers.
“I thought he was my friend,” Doonan says. “One second he’s smiling, and the next second his face goes blank and you’re on the floor after being shot.”
Surviving with the guilt of living
Doonan is a member of a grim fraternity of people who narrowly missed death at the hands of a mass killer. Their ranks grew last week when James Holmes was accused of killing 12 people and wounding 58 others in a movie theater.
Though media attention has focused on the resilience of the survivors in the immediate wake of the Aurora, Colorado, shooting, Doonan represents a part of their story that’s seldom told: What happens to them years after the television cameras and reporters have left?
That question drove Ron Franscell to track down survivors of some of the most notorious mass killings in American history. He wanted to know why some survivors find a way to move on, while others never recover.
What he discovered was disturbing. Most of the 30 survivors he tracked down for his book, “Delivered From Evil,” had lost the will and ability to live, he says.
“They’re already dead,” Franscell says. “They’re just waiting for the body to stop. They have no tools to be what they were before.”
Most of the people Franscell interviewed missed death “by a hair’s breadth.” At least two of them talked with CNN about the Colorado shootings.
Among Franscell’s survivors: an idealistic college student shot by the infamous University of Texas Tower sniper in 1966 who decided to enter the ministry; a survivor of the 1984 McDonald’s massacre near San Diego who developed a fetish for firearms and serial killers; and a survivor of a 1949 rampage who buried his memories in an old suitcase no one wanted to open.
Opinion: Aurora shooting like reliving the Virginia Tech ordeal
They're already dead. They're just waiting for the body to stop. They have no tools to be what they were before.
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The story of Charlie Cohen is one of the most heartbreaking that Franscell uncovered.
Cohen was only 12 when Howard Unruh, a World War II veteran, went on a rampage and murdered Cohen’s parents, Maurice and Rose, in Camden, New Jersey. Cohen’s mother ordered him into the closet as Unruh’s heavy footsteps thundered up their home’s stairs. Cohen huddled in the closet as he heard Unruh shoot his mother to death. Unruh would eventually kill 13 people, including three children, that day in 1949.
Cohen grew up to become a linen salesman who was known for his sense of humor. Yet he never talked about his parents. When any of his three daughters asked about them, he said they died in an accident.
Yet his daughters sensed that Cohen was hiding something. He wouldn’t let them purchase pets or cut flowers for the same reason — they died. And once, when he granted a rare interview to a reporter about his parents’ deaths, he said:
“I was a kid. I listened to my mother. She yelled, ‘Hide, Charles, hide!’ That’s what I did. I hid in the closet.
“Thing is, I’m still in there.”
Unruh was arrested and imprisoned in a state insane asylum. Cohen dreamed of a day when he would get a call telling him that Unruh was dead. He told Franscell that he would go to Unruh’s grave and piss on it, and bury an old, brown suitcase filled with press clippings of his parent’s death.
“The suitcase that he put all of the mementoes in was, in effect, everything that was inside of him,” Franscell says.
Cohen never got his chance. He died of a heart attack at 72 in September 2009. Unruh outlived him by six weeks. He died at 88 in a nursing home, still lucid up to the last moments of his life, Franscell says.
When Cohen’s family found the suitcase, Franscell says they called him to ask if he wanted it.
“Nobody had ever opened it, although it was known that it had existed,” he says.
Cohen’s memories remained locked away in his suitcase. He never got a chance to bury it, nor mark Unruh’s grave. Someone else did that — though not in the way Cohen intended.
When Unruh was buried in an unmarked grave, a cemetery worker planted an object in the fresh dirt. It was an American flag to honor Unruh’s service in World War II.
