Man in Pitchfork Slayings Identified

Investigators on Thursday identified Jonathon David Bruce as the assailant who broke into a farmhouse, terrorized five children who were home alone and stabbed two of them to death with a pitchfork before he was shot to death by deputies.

Three girls, including one who was bleeding from puncture wounds, escaped through windows during the Wednesday attack and called 911.

“It’s such a shock,” the children’s teary-eyed father, John Carpenter, said Thursday. “You keep pinching yourself. I got to wake up.”

Officials said they knew of no connection between the victims and Bruce, 27, of Merced. Bruce was identified through fingerprint records from a 1999 arrest for being under the influence of a controlled substance and assaulting a police officer.

A woman who used to live near Bruce said he hated children.

The attack occurred while the children’s parents were out of the house, situated near farm fields 60 miles north of Fresno. Carpenter, 34, was at work--he is a carpenter--and their mother, Tephanie Carpenter, 34, had taken her car in to have the brakes checked.

“It’s worse than any horror you could imagine,” said Priscilla Hilton, 20, a cousin of the victims.

About 8 a.m., the oldest daughter, Jessica, 14, found a naked man in the living room, pulling his pants on. He had pushed furniture against the walls of the house to barricade himself and the children inside.

Sitting alongside her parents and sister Anna Marie, 13, at a news conference Thursday in a Merced hospital, Jessica said she locked herself in her room after seeing the man. He banged on her door, she said, and when she picked up the phone to call for help, the line was dead.

She heard a cry, so she escaped through a window to a neighbor’s house, cutting her bare feet along the way. No one was home, and when she returned to her house, Anna Marie and sister Vanessa, 11, were fleeing, too, saying that the man was attacking the remaining two children with a pitchfork.

Anna said the man had told her to lie down. The man jabbed the pitchfork at her, cutting her hands when she tried to defend herself.

“He looked possessed,” Anna said Thursday, hugging a teddy bear with her bandaged hands.

The youngest girl, Ashley, 9, came in from another room and yelled, “Stop it!” When the attacker turned his attention to Ashley, Anna and Vanessa ran down a hallway, pushing a bookshelf out of the way to get into a laundry room.

They locked themselves in, and the man came to the door and said, “Let me in, I’ll be nice to you.”

The girls fled through a window in the laundry room and went to a neighbor’s house, where they called 911. “They could hear Ashley screaming as they were running, and then she went quiet,” the father said.

On her call to the 911 dispatcher, Jessica said: “There’s somebody in my house who I don’t know. [He’s] stabbing my brother and sister with a pitchfork. You have to [be] careful, he’s going to kill them.”

Deputies entered the house through a front window and found the assailant coming at them with the pitchfork.

“He was pointing it at them and going right after them. He wouldn’t stop,” said Assistant Sheriff Henry Strength. “They were hollering at him to stop, but he wouldn’t stop. Finally they had to shoot him.”

Ashley and 7-year-old John William Carpenter were found dead in their beds. The boy had apparently been asleep during the attack.

Before being evicted last month, Bruce lived in a duplex behind Ann Adams’ house in downtown Merced.

She said Bruce had worked part-time as a telemarketer, but mostly stayed up late and paced around the neighborhood after his girlfriend moved out. “He just sort of went downhill,” Adams said. “He was just getting angrier and angrier.”

The victims’ family did not plan to return to their home. But John Carpenter said he was hanging on to something to be grateful for.

“I’ve got three daughters alive,” he said. “There are people who have had it worse, come home to nothing.

“Somewhere there’s a Mom and Dad somewhere feeling sorrowful like I am,” he said, referring to the killer’s parents. “I’d rather be on my end. Can you imagine having a son like that?”