PUBLISHED SUNDAY, AUGUST 24, 2003

'I want it to be over'

Victim`s children await execution

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Brett Norman
@PensacolaNewsJournal.com

James Barrett`s children are ready for their father`s killer to die.

Neither plans to attend Paul Hill`s execution at Florida State Prison in Starke on Sept. 3. But both look forward to Hill paying with his life for ambushing their 74-year-old father, who was escorting Dr. John Britton to a Pensacola abortion clinic on July 29, 1994.

"I hated him as much for being a smug, smiling, holier-than-thou pseudo-intellectual as I did for him shooting my dad," said son Bruce Barrett, 55, who travels frequently in his home-renovation business and was in Pensacola last week. "I hated his frickin` guts. I wanted to rip his head off."

Barrett`s daughter, Dandy Barrett, 60, is more restrained but no less adamant.

"The only thing to me is that Paul Hill murdered my father and Dr. Britton in the parking lot of The Ladies Center," she said. "He has had the opportunity to appeal, and now it is time for the sentence to be carried out. Nothing else matters. I want it to be over."

Barrett - a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel and three-war veteran - felt it was his duty to defend his country`s laws, his son said. He volunteered as an escort after Pensacola resident Michael Griffin killed Dr. David Gunn at another Pensacola abortion clinic in March 1993.

"It`s not that he was pro-abortion - anything but," the son said. "But when he saw young girls in trouble, he had a soft spot for them. He would huddle their heads and usher them in (the clinic).

"He thought people trying to work through problems should be supported - not yelled and screamed at over a fence. He thought no one had a right to interfere with someone`s legal choice."

The night before he was killed, however, the elder Barrett called his son to say he was ready to swap his responsibilities as an escort for a fishing pole.

The son still hates Hill for not letting that happen. But, in memory of his father, he has tempered his anger.

"As much as I would like to go down to Starke and pull that switch myself, I`ve got to stop and think about the way my father would be thinking," he said. "I think he would have no problem with Paul Hill`s death sentence, or with it being commuted to life in prison without parole, which, once again, is proof to me that he was a class act."