Source: The Chronicle Herald
By Steve Proctor / Staff Reporter WHO'S KILLING WHO Special Report

After five years in a segregation unit at the maximum security prison in Renous, N.B., 29-year-old Freeman MacNeil says he's learned that lesson the hard way.

And it's something he wishes he'd realized before he, Darren Muise, and Derek Wood began inching through the darkness towards a basement door at the Sydney River McDonald's in May 1992.

"There was no talk of violence or anything," MacNeil says of their plan to rob the McDonald's, where Wood worked.

"It was just some guys who got together and talked about an easy way to get fast money. It was supposed to be a break-and-enter into a business, not an armed robbery at all."

But MacNeil carried a gun and Muise wore a Halloween mask as the threesome entered the restaurant through the door Wood had left ajar during an earlier shift.

When they came face to face with employees Donna Warren, 22, and Arleen MacNeil (no relation), 20, "things just went totally out of control."

In the bloodbath that followed, MacNeil took a shovel handle and bashed the last breath out of maintenance worker and dedicated family man Neil Burroughs Jr., 29.

On his way out of the restaurant, he fired a fatal bullet into the forehead of maintenance worker Jimmy Fagan, 27.

Warren, who dreamed of going to law school, had been shot in the back of the head, and Arleen MacNeil, soon bound for university, had been left for dead. She is now permanently disabled.

Sitting in the visitor's centre at the Atlantic Institution, MacNeil is dressed in designer-label clothing and sporting the beginnings of a beard.

He says he's replayed the events of that night in his mind thousands of times. "If I could go back and change things, I obviously would," he says, his voice cracking.

"But that's not possible. There's no way to bring those people back. There's no way to restore Arleen to the way she was."

Now serving a life sentence with no chance of parole for 25 years, MacNeil says his violent actions that night were out of character.

Added: 2004