ACWORTH, Georgia — Bang.
Marcus Lyon heard the first gunshot and bolted upright on the massage table.
The woman who had just started massaging his neck looked at him and walked across the small room to open the hallway door.
Bang.
She dropped to the floor, blood pouring from her head.
Lyon, 31, dove for the floor and kept quiet.
Bang. Bang.
More gunshots.
Then the bell on the front door of Young’sYoung’s Asian Massage tinkled.
Silence returned.
Lyon jumped into his pants, raced out the door to his car, parked outside, grabbed his pistol, and was ready to fight off the shooter. The gunman was gone.
Behind him, a trail of carnage. Moaning men and women, bleeding and dying.
Lyon called 911.
“I said you all need to come. People are dead.”
Four people died in the shooting, two at the spa and two later at Wellstar Kennestone Hospital. A fifth person remains hospitalized.
Lyon, a delivery driver, said he was a first-time customer Tuesday. He’d seen the spa while working in the area, and with an aching back and neck from climbing in and out of his truck all day, he figured a massage was worth a shot.
“She had maybe two rubs on my neck before I heard the gunshot,” said Lyon. “She opened up the door, and I heard another ”pow” sound.”
Lyon waited as the police arrived. They took his gun and his witness statement, and medics carried away the wounded and the dead. Too upset to share the bed with his girlfriend and four-year-old son, Lyon slept on the couch that night.
On Thursday morning, he returned to the spa to look at the growing memorial of flowers and candles and signs. He didn’t know the victims, he said, but they mattered to him.
