Former NFL Player Buster Barnett's Wife, Mistress Found Dead in Apparent Murder-Suicide
The love triangle between former NFL player Buster Barnett, his wife and his mistress has ended in tragedy. Local police have confirmed that both women were found dead in an SUV on a highway in Alabama, resulting from circumstances that played out like the plot of a revenge thriller.
According to authorities, Barnett's mistress Lisa Brown shot and killed the former Buffalo Bills player's wife Sandra Barnett in a fit of jealous rage, and then turned the gun on herself. The murder-suicide occured after Brown kidnapped Mrs. Barnett from her Atlanta home on Wednesday.
“[Brown] was upset about a trip that his wife was going on with him and it was one she didn’t know about,” detectives revealed on Friday. According to Barnett, Brown had confronted him about the trip at his work place earlier in the day on Wednesday, and then headed to his home to confront his wife.
Sandra Barnett, a special needs teacher, was on the phone with a friend when Brown showed up with a gun, detectives tell the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. The friend could hear what sounded like a struggle and then wasn't able to reach Barnett on the phone. She then sent a male friend to check on Barnett, who saw a woman assumed to be Brown in an SUV on the driveway. Brown had sped away by the time the male friend circled back to the house.
Law enforcement spotted the SUV in Atlanta, and gave chase across state lines into Alabama. By the time they approached the vehicle, both women were dead of fatal gunshot wounds. “The driver stopped in the middle of the highway, pulled out a handgun and shot [Barnett] and then turned the gun on herself,” a detective said.
Buster Barnett was drafted by the Bills in 1981 straight out of Jackson State University. He played for three years in the NFL and went on to work in the public school system in Atlanta. He admitted to police that he had been carrying on an affair with Brown for several years, and that she lashed out at home over the planned trip with his wife just before the kidnapping. Brown was already on probation for kidnapping her child, of whom she had lost custody, in Texas.
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(Photo: WXIA-11, NBC Local News Atlanta)
