uExpress.com: As I See It by Cynthia Tucker -- (07/30/1999) ATLANTA'S SUMMER OF MURDER BECOMES ALL TOO FAMILIAR

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ATLANTA'S SUMMER OF MURDER BECOMES ALL TOO FAMILIAR

07/30/1999

Summer started familiarly enough, the humidity and temperature rising in tandem. It was indistinct from Southern summers past, sultry and unhurried, as usual. Old patterns exerted themselves -- lawns dying of heat, rush-hour traffic disrupted by sudden thunderstorms, smoky barbecue fires in city parks.

The familiarity was not to last. It is still hot, still humid, still hazy, but something vital has changed. By the time a crazed gunman ended a Buckhead killing spree by shooting himself on Thursday evening, the sense of an ordinary summer in metropolitan Atlanta had died, too, drilled full of bullet holes. How could it be otherwise with a string of bloody massacres in less than three weeks?

On July 12, Cyrano Marks shot and killed two adult sisters, including his girlfriend, and four of the household's children (a fifth child was wounded but survived) before killing himself in the house they all shared on Atlanta's south side. It was the worst mass murder in Atlanta history -- a record that lasted less than a month.

On July 23, Greg Smith attacked a neighbor and shot and wounded a police officer who came to investigate. When SWAT officers stormed his house in a working-class suburban neighborhood hours later, he shot two of them dead. Police later killed him as he tried to escape.

Even as one of those slain police officers was being laid to rest on Long Island, N.Y., Mark O. Burton, a day trader, opened fire on two stock-brokerage offices, killing nine people. Twelve others were injured. As the horror continued to unfold, police discovered the bodies of his wife and two children, bludgeoned to death with a hammer, in their home in a southern suburb. Police also revealed that Burton was the prime suspect in the beating deaths of his first wife and her mother in Cedar Bluff, Ala., in 1993.

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There were preludes to this summer of bloodshed: the shootings at a suburban high school just before school ended (on the heels of the carnage at Colorado's Columbine High), the string of accidental shootings of small children by their playmates in late spring. But for a few lazy, hazy weeks, it seemed that summer might bring a welcome change of headlines, if only in the form of unbearable heat.

Hot weather, at least, is something Atlantans are used to, something we can get our heads around, something we can talk about. It is a comfortable conversational topic across the Deep South, uniting strangers across lines of color and class, religion and occupation. At the train station, at the supermarket, on the Little League field, we know how to trade tales of air-conditioners gone haywire at the worst of times, of the dreaded monthly bill for that precious cool air, of the dehumidifier purchased on sale.

We cannot have those easy and comfortable conversations about Cyrano Marks or Greg Smith or, especially, Mark Burton. Marks, at least, left us room to distance ourselves; his massacre was a case of "family violence." Smith, too, gave us a psychic hiding place; we believe we can stay away from neighbors who show any signs of erratic or abusive behavior, as he did in the months before his final violent outburst.

But Burton shattered our illusions of safety and routine, coming out of nowhere to launch his grim attack in a crowded office building in Buckhead, Atlanta's glitziest neighborhood and one of its safest. We cannot hide from his kind. They could be at the mall, in the park, at the movies where we go to escape the heat.

It has become a disturbing summer, altogether unrecognizable. The pity is, in this gun-sodden and violence-filled culture, its bloodshed may come to seem familiar.