THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1994, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Saturday, July 30, 1994 TAG: 9407300217
SECTION: FRONT PAGE: A1 EDITION: FINAL
SOURCE: BY MIKE CLARY and HENRY CHU, LOS ANGELES TIMES
DATELINE: PENSACOLA, FLA. LENGTH: Medium: 96 lines
An abortion doctor and his volunteer escort were shotgunned to death Friday outside an abortion clinic, 16 months after a similar fatal attack here prompted federal legislation banning violence against workers at such facilities.
Police almost immediately arrested Paul Jennings Hill, 40, a well-known anti-abortion activist, and charged him with two counts of murder, as well as one of attempted murder in the wounding of the wife of the volunteer escort.
Hill often demonstrated outside the clinic with placards advocating violence against doctors who perform abortions.
``I know one thing: No innocent babies are going to be killed in that clinic today,'' police said Hill declared after his arrest Friday morning a few hundred yards away from The Ladies Center, one of two abortion clinics in the city.
Hill, a former minister with the Presbyterian Church in America and The Orthodox Presbyterian Church, is director of Defensive Action, an anti-abortion group he founded after Dr. David Gunn was slain outside another Pensacola clinic last year.
Gunn's slaying rocketed Pensacola into the national spotlight, turning a port town that draws military retirees and conservative Christians into what some have billed ``the Selma of the abortion-rights movement,'' a reference to the Alabama city associated with violent resistance to the 1960s civil rights movement.
President Clinton and activists on both sides of the issue were quick to denounce Friday's attack, which killed physician John Bayard Britton, 69, and his escort, retired Air Force Lt. Col. James Herman Barrett, 74, and wounded Barrett's wife, June.
``I am strongly committed to ending this form of domestic terrorism that threatens the fabric of our country,'' Clinton said.
Attorney General Janet Reno pledged to investigate any concerted movement targeting abortion clinics with violence.
``How many more people must die in these `isolated incidents' before these terrorists are stopped?'' the National Abortion Federation said in a statement. ``We will not give in.''
Flip Benham, director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue National, said, ``We are appalled.'' But he added that the killings ``reflected the same spirit of murder that exists inside where they are killing little children.''
Susan Carpenter-Millan, a prominent anti-abortion activist in Southern California, said that she had talked to Hill four months ago ``and found him a tragedy waiting to happen. . . . I can only conclude that not only is he not pro-life, but he has become as of today that which he condemns, a cold-blooded killer.
``Anything short of aggressive condemnation (of the murders) will seriously damage the credibility of the pro-life movement,'' she said.
The attack occurred as the Barretts, volunteer escorts for about a year, arrived at the clinic with Britton, a Jacksonville-area doctor whom the couple picked up from the Pensacola airport for his weekly shift at The Ladies Center, a slightly shabby two-story wooden building fenced in from all sides on the north side of town.
The three pulled up in the center parking lot shortly before 7:30 a.m. and before the arrival of an off-duty, uniformed police officer hired by the clinic for security. Pensacola police said Hill ambushed the trio, blowing out both windows of their truck and mortally wounding James Barrett and Britton, who wore a homemade bulletproof vest.
Officers, responding to a 911 call, found Hill walking away from the scene followed by three to four witnesses who waved and pointed at him as the suspected killer. Hill, who had been ordered by police just 40 minutes earlier to pull up crosses he had planted outside the clinic as part of an early-morning protest, was arrested without incident.
Officers recovered more than a dozen 12-gauge shells from Hill's person and a pump-action shotgun behind an oak tree on clinic grounds, near the Barretts' truck.
Hill is to be arraigned today. The murder charges leave open the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted.
A hysterical June Barrett, 68, was taken from the crime scene to a local hospital, where she was in fair condition Friday afternoon.
Friday's violence led abortion-rights supporters to worry that doctors will be even more reluctant to provide abortions in a region where anti-abortion sentiment, often vocal and sometimes violent, runs high. Pensacola's two clinics, now the scenes of the nation's only fatal abortion-related shootings, are the only abortion providers between Mobile, Ala., and Tallahassee, Fla., a stretch of several hundred miles. ILLUSTRATION: ASSOCIATED PRESS color photo
Anti-abortion activist Paul Jennings Hill is escorted from the
Pensacola, Fla., police headquarters.
Staff color map
Area shown: Pensacola, Fla.
KEYWORDS: ABORTION SHOOTING MURDER by CNB