Georgia is no stranger to mass killings.
Robert Aaron Long, the latest in a long string of suspected killers The Atlanta Journal-Constitution has covered, is accused of killing eight people Tuesday night at three separate spas. He was taken into custody on I-75 in Crisp County after allegedly fleeing shootings in Atlanta.
FULL COVERAGE: Atlanta spa shootings
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
Credit: John Spink / John.Spink@ajc.com
The killing spree represents the largest taking of life in the metro Atlanta area by a single individual since 1999, when day trader Mark Barton shot and killed nine people at the Buckhead office complex where he worked.
Tuesday night’s events are not the first time a mass shooter has targeted an Atlanta spa. In 2013, Jeong Soo Paek shot dead four members of his family at Norcross’s Su Jung Health Salon before killing himself.
Some high-profile incidents, such as the 1999 mass shooting at Heritage High School in Rockdale County or that in Kennesaw at a FedEx facility in 2014, left several people wounded but none of the victims died. The Heritage shooter, T.J. Solomon, surrendered; Geddy Kramer, the FedEx shooter, killed himself at the scene.
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com
Credit: HYOSUB SHIN / hshin@ajc.com
There’s no standard definition for what constitutes a mass shooting. But the Investigative Assistance for Violent Crimes Act of 2012, used by the FBI, defines a mass killing as three or more people killed in a single incident. Spree killing is more clearly defined, with the U.S. Bureau of Justice Statistics terming such events as “killings at two or more locations with almost no time break between murders.”
Here is a list of Georgia’s more notorious mass and spree killings from the 1940s to now:
July 1946: Moore’s Ford lynching: Two Black couples were shot and killed in rural Walton County by a white mob. No one has been charged for the crime and the GBI closed the case in 2019.
May 1973: Six members of the Ned Alday family were killed in Seminole County. Wayne Coleman, George Dungee and brothers Carl and Billy Isaacs, only 15 at the time of the crime, were charged and tried. Coleman and Dungee are serving multiple life sentences in prison. Carl Isaacs was executed in 2003. Billy Isaacs served 20 years in prison for armed robbery and burglary.
July 1999: Cyrano Marks killed his girlfriend and five other members of her family at her Atlanta home. He committed suicide the same day, making a total of seven lives lost. The only survivor of the attack was the 11-year-old son of his girlfriend, who hid in a closet for hours after being wounded.
July 1999: Mark Barton, a day trader of stocks, killed his wife and two children at their home in Henry County before going on a shooting spree later at the Buckhead office complex where he worked, killing a total of nine people there and wounding 13. He later killed himself as police approached his vehicle in Acworth.
Jan. 2004: Jerry William Jones strangled his 10-month-old daughter and shot three of his ex-girlfriend’s family members dead before kidnapping two of his other children and a third child, driving to the last exit before I-75 crosses into Tennessee, where he shot himself in the face. Jones is now on Georgia’s death row.
March 2005: Rape suspect Brian Gene Nichols took a gun from a guard at the Fulton County Courthouse and shot and killed three people, including the judge presiding over his trial. After escaping the courthouse, he later killed a federal agent. Nichols, convicted Nov. 7, 2008, of 54 crimes including multiple counts of murder, is serving a sentence of life in prison.
Jan. 2010: Jesse James Warren allegedly shot five people, killing four, at a Penske Truck Rental near Kennesaw. Warren, a former Penske employee, was found too delusional to stand trial in 2017 and was committed indefinitely to a state psychiatric institution.
Jan. 2013: Jeong Soo Paek shoots four members of his family dead at Norcross’s Su Jung Health Salon before killing himself.
April 2014: Geddy Kramer shoots six people at the FedEx facility in Kennesaw where he worked as a package handler, critically wounding one. Kramer took his own life at the scene.
Jan. 2019: Daylon Delon Gamble is accused of killing four people in Rockmart in two separate incidents. Gamble was captured in Indianapolis after being on the run from authorities for three days. In July 2019, Polk District Attorney Jack Browning announced his intent to seek the death penalty against Gamble.
March 2021: Robert Aaron Long is accused of killing eight people at three separate metro spas during a shooting spree ranging from Cherokee County to northeast Atlanta. Long told police sex addiction was the reason for the shootings.
About the Author
