Jaider Felipe Marulanda, 43, drove to the Penske Truck Rental near Kennesaw Tuesday to get his rental truck serviced.
He died there, one of five people allegedly shot by a man who lost his job at Penske last summer and returned on Tuesday with a gun. Marulanda and his wife, who were teenage sweethearts, had just celebrated their 25th wedding anniversary, their daughter said.
He was one of three who were killed; the third, Roberto Gonzalez, 31, died on Wednesday at a Cobb County hospital. Two others remain in critical condition.
The day of the shooting, Erika Marulanda recalled, her parents had breakfast together. Cereal, like always. Then her dad hugged his son Alejandro, 11, before the boy caught the bus for school.
“I believe he went to Penske to get something fixed on his truck,” said Erika, who is in medical school at Columbia University, by e-mail Wednesday night. “I think he went to that Penske all the time.”
Erika recalls a recent family trip to New York City the summer before she started med school.
“We stopped on the Chesapeake Bridge and the Jersey shore, all places we used to go when I was little,” she said. “My dad was a wonderful loving husband, father and friend.”
The AJC learned Wednesday that two of the employees who were shot were related by marriage, compounding the tragedy for one family in particular.
The widow of Roberto Gonzalez is the sister of Joshua B. Holbrook, 27, who was in critical condition in a Cobb County hospital Wednesday night.
Their lives all intersected Tuesday with that of Jesse James Warren, 60, who is now charged with three counts of murder and is being held without bond in the Cobb County jail. Warren is reported to have shot at least three victims in the head; Cobb police refused to say where the two others were shot, nor what sort of weapon was used nor how many shots were fired.
Warren lived quietly with his wife in rural Carroll County, by most accounts. On Wednesday, few in the community seemed to know much about him.
Local court records indicate that Warren has had financial trouble since losing his job at Penske in July.
Warren and his wife, Virginia, missed the Dec. 1 deadline on their property taxes — $642.14 on a small house on 44 acres in the Draketown community, according to county records. The Warrens have owned the property since 1995, the records say; it is currently valued at $68,571.
In addition, last September, a credit card company sued Warren, claiming he hadn’t paid his $4,857.64 balance, according to court records. The case is pending.
On Wednesday, about a half-dozen dilapidated cars and trucks were parked in the frozen dirt driveway or scattered around the Warren property, and a long livestock trailer had been parked beside the house. A ladder leaned against the roof and a new-looking silver grill with a hood stood on the front porch. In the small front yard, a rusty metal one-piece picnic table sat not far from an hay rake.
Open fields and stands of trees separate the houses. Neighbors don’t interact much, said James Spake, who grew up in the neighborhood and lives about a mile from the Warren house. He drives by it on his way to work at the University of West Georgia in Carrollton but has never met Warren.
“Unless you work with folks or go to church with them, you don’t know them,” he said. “We don’t really know any folks around here.”
A couple of neighbors contacted by phone near Warren’s residence on Ga. 113 Tuesday said they didn’t know Warren, noting that it’s not unusual for people in relatively unpopulated areas to be strangers.
Even the people who did meet Warren don’t recall anything special about the man. Diane Spray, a checkout clerk at the Super Foods in Temple, said Warren and his wife shopped regularly at the store.
“He never said anything much unless we said something to him,” she said. “He was quiet, just a regular customer.”
Warren, gray-haired and blue-eyed, is 5 foot 8 and weighs 180 pounds, according to Cobb County jail files.
He worked for Penske as a truck mechanic from June 2005 through July 2009, Penske Trucking President Brian Hard said Wednesday. Hard would not disclose why Warren no longer worked at Penske but said his “separation” was “not part of a large economically driven layoff.”
Police have not speculated on a motive in the attack, but CBS Atlanta quoted two people who knew Warren as saying that racism may have played a part.
"There were a lot of Hispanics that worked [at Penske] and that's one reason he was real mad, because they let him go and kept them," Fran Garner, a grocery store employee, told the station.
Garner said Warren came into her grocery store frequently and she told CBS Atlanta that he often complained about losing his job to minorities.
Another acquaintance of Warren made similar comments.
"He would be upset if he lost his job because Jessie did a good job,” Jeff peters told the station. “[Warren] took it seriously.”
Barbara Springer, whose husband of 37 years was among those killed, told WSB-TV her husband Van didn’t talk about Warren often but had said that he was laid off and “had some issues.”
Springer’s daughter, Angela Brents, through tears over the phone, told the AJC Wednesday evening that her father was “a very strong Christian man, a family man. He loved his [five] grandchildren.”
Brents, who lives in Ponchatoula, La., said her dad worked for Penske “for a long time.” She said he had talked about Warren, but she wouldn’t elaborate.
Hard, the Penske Trucking president, said the four employees who were shot all worked in the garage area of the facility, as “maintenance supervisors, technicians, customer service reps.”
The fifth victim, Marulanda, was a driver for El Maizal, a local food distributor and Penske customer, “who, I believe, was just here to get his truck serviced,” Hard said.
“It appears to have been random,” Hard said. “To come in and shoot one of our customers who couldn’t possibly have been involved in any grievance.
“We are still trying to understand what happened here and we are fully cooperating with law enforcement officials,” Hard said.
He also remarked on the quick thinking of the manager of Penske’s rental division in Kennesaw, which is in an area of the building adjacent to the shop. “He heard the gunshots. He immediately knew they were coming from the shop, and he immediately locked the door from the shop. He shepherded all of the rental employees up to the second floor,” Hard said.
Neighbors said victim Joshua Holbrook moved with his wife and two boys from Rome to Cartersville about a year ago.
Rhonda Smalley, a Cartersville neighbor, said she just ran into Holbrook gassing up at the QT on his way to work Tuesday. She said she waved to him.
“I always see him out in the yard, playing with his two kids,” she said. “They got little push scooters for Christmas, and he’s out there with them. He plays football and basketball with them. He’s a good hands-on dad as far as I can see.”
Staff writers Ty Tagami, Mike Morris, Andria Simmons, Pat Fox, Sheila Poole, Mary Lou Pickel, Nancy Badertscher and Tammy Joyner contributed to this report.