Doctor, Volunteer Slain Outside Abortion Clinic : Crime: A third person is wounded. Police arrest a local activist walking from the shooting scene in Florida.

An abortion doctor and his volunteer escort were shotgunned to death Friday outside an abortion clinic, 16 months after a similar fatal attack here prompted federal legislation banning violence against such facilities.

Police almost immediately arrested Paul Jennings Hill, 40, a well-known anti-abortion activist, and charged him with two counts of murder and one of attempted murder in the wounding of the wife of the volunteer escort.

Hill often demonstrated outside the clinic with placards advocating violence against doctors who perform abortions.

“I know one thing: No innocent babies are going to be killed in that clinic today,” police said Hill declared after his arrest Friday morning a few hundred yards away from The Ladies Center, one of two abortion clinics in this city.

A fatal attack on an abortion doctor at the other clinic last year rocketed Pensacola into the national spotlight, turning a port town that draws military retirees and conservative Christians into what some have billed “the Selma of the abortion-rights movement,” a reference to the Alabama city associated with violent resistance to the 1960s civil rights movement.

President Clinton and activists on both sides of the issue were quick to denounce Friday’s attack, which killed physician John Bayard Britton, 69, and James Herman Barrett, 74, and wounded Barrett’s wife, June, 68.

“I am strongly committed to ending this form of domestic terrorism that threatens the fabric of our country,” Clinton said.

Atty. Gen. Janet Reno pledged to investigate any concerted movement targeting abortion clinics with violence.

“How many more people must die in these ‘isolated incidents’ before these terrorists are stopped?” the National Abortion Federation said in a statement. “We will not give in.”

Flip Benham, director of the anti-abortion group Operation Rescue National, said, “We are appalled.” But he added that the killings “reflected the same spirit of murder that exists inside where they are killing little children.”

Susan Carpenter-McMillan, a prominent anti-abortion activist in Southern California, said she had talked to Hill four months ago “and found him a tragedy waiting to happen . . . . I can only conclude that not only is he not pro-life, but he has become as of today that which he condemns, a cold-blooded killer.”

“Anything short of aggressive condemnation (of the murders) will seriously damage the credibility of the pro-life movement,” she said.

The attack occurred as the Barretts, volunteer escorts for about a year, arrived at the clinic with Britton, a Jacksonville-area doctor whom the couple picked up from the Pensacola airport for his weekly shift at The Ladies Center, a slightly shabby two-story wooden building fenced in from all sides on the north side of town.

The three pulled up in the center parking lot shortly before 7:30 a.m. and before the arrival of an off-duty, uniformed police officer hired by the clinic for security. Pensacola police said Hill ambushed the trio, blowing out both windows of the truck and mortally wounding both James Barrett and Britton, who wore a homemade bulletproof vest.

“It’s not a pretty sight to see two people shot in the head with a shotgun,” said Pensacola Police Sgt. Jerry Potts, who described the faces of the men as nearly unrecognizable.

Officers, responding to a 911 call, found Hill walking away from the scene followed by three to four witnesses who waved and pointed at him as the suspected killer. Hill, who had been ordered by police just 40 minutes earlier to pull up crosses he had planted outside the clinic as part of an early-morning protest, was arrested without incident.

Officers recovered more than a dozen 12-gauge shells from Hill’s person and a pump-action shotgun behind an oak tree on clinic grounds, near the Barretts’ truck.

Hill, a bespectacled auto restorer and leader of the militant Defense America anti-abortion group, is scheduled to be arraigned today. As he was led to jail, he was seen smiling. The murder charges leave open the possibility of the death penalty if he is convicted.

June Barrett, who was struck by shotgun pellets in the attack, was taken from the crime scene to a local hospital, where she was in fair condition Friday afternoon.

“There’s no doubt in her mind that Paul Hill was trying to kill everybody in the car,” Bill Caplinger, a fellow clinic escort, said after a visit with Mrs. Barrett. “She’s proud of Jim. He was doing what he believed in.”

Friday’s violence led abortion-rights supporters to worry that doctors will be further reluctant to provide abortions in a region where anti-abortion sentiment, often vocal and sometimes violent, runs high. Pensacola’s two clinics, now the scenes of the nation’s only fatal abortion-related shootings, are the only abortion providers between Mobile, Ala., and Tallahassee, a stretch of several hundred miles.

As such, they have been the targets of several demonstrations and attacks in the past, including a firebombing a decade ago that damaged The Ladies Center, which provides first-trimester abortions.

Immediately adjoining the center lies a small plot of land owned by local anti-abortion activist John Burt, a triangular lot sporting a statue of a weeping woman and a sign dedicated to “over 26 million babies murdered since 1973 in the American Holocaust.”

Scaffolding erected outside the perimeter of the clinic on land owned by Burt also allowed protesters to peer into the center.

Britton, the father of five, knew that working at the clinics posed a risk and often carried a .357 magnum in his car, according to a recent magazine profile.

“I couldn’t get him to tell me about how he felt about (the danger). Maybe he was scared--but not scared enough,” Vanita McKinney, Britton’s companion and nurse for the last 10 years, said Friday from the home the two shared in Fernandina Beach, about 300 miles from Pensacola.

Volunteers at The Ladies Center were shaken by the attack but vowed to continue their work.

“We won’t back down. That was Dr. Gunn’s song, and it’s a good one,” Caplinger said.

“I’m kind of numb. It seems so impossible for that to happen,” said escort Pat Welch.

She said protesters are a regular fixture at the clinic, including Hill, who police said was arrested a month ago on a misdemeanor charge for “hollering and screaming” outside the center.

“He would smile and say ‘God bless you’ and ‘God forgive you.’ I never took him seriously, but I knew he was dangerous.”

Welch and others described the Barretts as a warm couple, especially James Barrett, a retired U.S. Air Force lieutenant colonel who met his wife just a few years ago.

“He was tough, personable, wasn’t afraid of a thing,” Welch said. “A very strong man. I felt very secure around him.”

Down the road from The Ladies Center, Sandy Sheldon, an administrator of Pensacola Women’s Medical Services--the clinic where Gunn was killed last year--said her office was aghast.

“We knew that eventually he (Hill) would flip out. We were not surprised to hear it was Paul Hill. It’s hard to believe it has happened again.”

Potts of the Pensacola police force said security would be stepped up at both clinics today. He acknowledged that police knew of Hill’s support of violence against abortion providers and that officers closely monitored his activities during the trial of Michael Griffin, who was convicted earlier this year of killing Gunn.

But he defended the department, saying Hill’s constitutional rights allowed him to carry his signs and protest peacefully.

“We could not take that right away from him,” he said.

Chu is a Times staff writer and Clary is a special correspondent. Times researchers Doug Conner in Seattle, Edith Stanley in Atlanta and D’Jamila Salem in Los Angeles contributed to this story.