In the summer of 1999, a quiet life that had sought refuge from violence was tragically cut short. Vadewattee Muralidhara, a 44-year-old woman, was among the victims of a senseless shooting rampage in Atlanta, Georgia. An immigrant from Trinidad and Tobago, she and her family had moved to the United States in 1994, hoping to escape the specter of crime they had experienced in their homeland, where they were once held at gunpoint.
In Georgia, they believed they had found a safer haven to build their dreams.
On that fateful day in July, Muralidhara was in a brokerage firm, a place of business and financial planning, when a gunman named Mark Orrin Barton began firing indiscriminately. She was not a personal enemy of Barton; she was simply in the wrong place at the wrong time, an innocent bystander caught in a maelstrom of another's rage. Her death was one of several that day at the hands of a man who had also murdered his own family before turning his violence on the public.
The perpetrator, Mark Orrin Barton, did not face earthly justice for his horrific acts. After his shooting spree through two office buildings, he took his own life. In notes he left behind, Barton expressed remorse for killing his family but showed no such sentiment for the individuals he gunned down in the brokerage firms. For the family of Vadewattee Muralidhara, including her husband, a pediatrician, and her two children, the loss was immeasurable, a painful irony that the very violence they sought to escape had found them in their new home.
