The legal wake's still rippling behind Mark Barton, who left nine people dead and more injured when he walked out of day-trading offices one summer day in 1999. He'd already killed his wife and two children and soon would put a gun to his own head.
What's left now, of course, are the lawsuits.
A dozen lawsuits in Atlanta blame the tragedy on Barton and, in large part, on All-Tech Investment Group Inc and Momentum Securities, where he had lost more than US$500,000 and returned July 29, 1999, to seek his vengeance.
The suits, filed by some of those Barton injured and some of the families of those he killed, accuse the firms of predatory practices that encouraged people to trade beyond their means, lose their life savings and become so emotionally unstable that violence was foreseeable.
Even if that's true -- and the firms deny it -- should they be blamed for a crazed man's actions? In a legal sense, no. The question is whether the firms should have foreseen the tragedy. A judge has said they couldn't have been expected to.
But in a moral sense, they are not entirely blameless.
"We really believe that the day-trader companies created, quote, Mark Barton, unquote," says David Zacks, who represents plaintiffs from the All-Tech shootings.
For one thing, the trading firms promised they wouldn't let customers overextend themselves but then allowed Barton to lose US$500,000 -- which he did not have -- mostly in commissions, says Zacks.
There's no question that the day-trading industry had serious problems. Misleading advertising and improper margin lending were cited when the US Securities and Exchange Commission and the National Association of Securities Dealers took enforcement action against 20 day-trading firms in 2000 and last year.
Commissions were so high and the trades so frequent, that the average day-trader had to bring in US$111,000 a year just to break even, according to the Senate Permanent Subcommittee on Investigations.
"I'm not going to say that day trading is crystal pure and didn't have any problems," says Michael Gorby, an Atlanta lawyer representing All-Tech. "But I really don't think it had anything to do with July 29. Mark Barton was a deranged man." No one would argue that Barton was stable. Though never charged, Barton was the main suspect in the bludgeoning deaths of his first wife and her mother in 1993, long before he walked into a day-trading room.
Still, day trading had something to do with what happened July 29, 1999. That morning he wrote a note that closed with: "I don't plan to live very much longer. Just long enough to kill as many of the people that greedily sought my destruction." That afternoon he set off for Momentum and All-Tech's Atlanta trading offices, located across the street from each other.
"They created this mess," says Michael Weinstock, an Atlanta lawyer representing some of the plaintiffs.
Momentum and All-Tech deny predatory practices and deny responsibility. "There's absolutely no basis for those accusations," says Douglas Abolt, an Atlanta lawyer representing Momentum.
Besides, Barton, a former chemist, never did anything while at Momentum to hint at what might come, Abolt says.
Whether the firms were responsible may never get to a jury, given a ruling from the judge at a hearing last month.
Even assuming the allegations are true, the companies can't be held responsible "for a consequence which is merely possible," Fulton State Court Judge Susan Forsling said in a ruling, "only for a consequence which is probable according to ordinary and usual experience."
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