Bakersfield Mass Slaying Suspect Arrested, Let Go

BAKERSFIELD -- In a fast-paced turn of events, police in North Carolina on Wednesday arrested, and then released, a respected Bakersfield elementary school vice principal who is a suspect in the shooting deaths of his ex-wife, her mother and his three small children.

Vincent Brothers, 41, was arrested in the afternoon in Elizabeth City, N.C., for what Bakersfield Police Chief Eric Matlock called the worst crime he had seen in more than three decades in law enforcement.

“This community has never experienced anything like this,” Matlock said.

But hours later, Bakersfield police announced that Brothers was being set free.

“At 9 p.m. tonight, we made a strategic and investigative decision to release Mr. Brothers,” Bakersfield Police Capt. Neil Mahan said at a news conference. He said “additional information ... has come in from another state” that prompted the release. He would not say what that information was nor identify the state. Mahan said the decision also was made after conversations with the Kern County district attorney, but he wouldn’t elaborate.

Although Brothers remained the only suspect in the case, there was no longer probable cause to hold him, Mahan said.

He said Brothers was not considered a risk to flee and added, “He may be rearrested.”

Authorities in North Carolina said Brothers had walked into a police station in downtown Elizabeth City shortly before midnight Tuesday, the day the bodies of the five victims were discovered at their Bakersfield home.

“He just came in and made some requests for us and we tried to facilitate the request because of who he was,” said Capt. George F. Koch, acting police chief of Elizabeth City. “He was here voluntarily and could have left any time.”

Brothers spent the night at the police station, and Bakersfield police detectives arrived Wednesday morning to interview him. He refused to answer questions, they said, but by 2:30 p.m. they had concluded there was enough evidence to arrest him, according to Koch.

Bakersfield police refused to discuss what evidence they had against Brothers, who had a stormy relationship with his ex-wife, Joanie Harper, but was described as a conscientious, even beloved, educator. Among the questions left unanswered was how long Brothers had been in North Carolina, and whether he might have an alibi that would place him far from the crime scene at the time of the killings. Police said Brothers had retained an attorney.

Besides Harper, 39, the victims included her children with Brothers, Marques, 4; Lyndsey, 23 months; and Marshall, 6 weeks, as well as Harper’s mother, Earnestine Harper, 70, a respected leader in Bakersfield’s close-knit African American community. Their bodies, all bearing gunshot wounds, were discovered Tuesday morning by a friend who had grown concerned after not seeing the family since church services Sunday. Authorities were waiting for autopsy results to help determine when they were killed.

Those who knew the family were still reeling from the news Wednesday. “I can’t hardly believe it,” said Mike Woessner, principal of Rafer Johnson Community Day School, where Joanie Harper had worked as a campus supervisor since 2000. “It’s kind of like a dream.”

Woessner said Harper was a popular figure at the alternative school for seventh- and eighth-graders. She was remembered for wearing gold-and-purple Laker jerseys and driving an old black Jaguar.

The students who attend the school are often troubled and transfer there because of disciplinary or emotional reasons, he said. Many school workers consider the assignment a challenge, but it was one that Harper sought.

Before coming to Rafer Johnson, Harper worked at Emerson Middle School and Fremont Elementary School. Brothers was vice principal at Emerson and then Fremont at the same time she worked at the schools.

“Joanie was a very quiet person, but so effective with the kids who came to us with a multitude of problems,” Woessner said. He added that he planned to create a memorial beneath a Chinese elm tree where he often saw her sitting on the Johnson campus.

A makeshift memorial consisting of a pile of teddy bears took shape Wednesday outside the house where the victims lived.

A Bakersfield resident, Becca McGrath, 28, came by with her 4-month-old daughter, Kelly, and left a baby blanket at the site, along a wrought-iron fence. “I can’t do anything for them, but this is my way of paying my respects to them, to the small child especially,” McGrath said.

A handful of women canvassed the residential street, passing out green leaflets publicizing a community meeting set for Tuesday, and asking residents to “bring your hurt, grieves, disappointments, anger and pain.... We are not targeting any groups or individual for persecution or prosecution. We are striving for unity.”

Mickey Sturdivant, 53, is the founder and president of Mothers Against Senseless Killings, which is sponsoring the event. Sturdivant, who grew up in the predominantly black neighborhood, said that when she was a child, her mother had taught her to respect Earnestine Harper, a force for good in the community.

“My mama would say, ‘If that lady talks to you, don’t you talk back. If she tells you to do something, you do it.’ ”

As an adult, Sturdivant said, she helped the senior Harper organize trips to Sacramento for community members to lobby for reform of California’s legal system. Harper’s impact on Bakersfield was immeasurable, she said.

“But we can’t stop here. I’m just ready to pick up the baton and keep doing what she did,” Sturdivant added.

Joanie Harper and Brothers were married in January 2000, but the marriage appeared to have been troubled from the start. Brothers filed for dissolution one month after the marriage, and Harper filed for nullification nine months later. The marriage was nullified on Sept. 26, 2001.

Still, the couple continued to be together, off and on, and friends and family members said they considered them to be married. Ted Dixon, who is married to Joanie Harper’s cousin, said he had seen her with Brothers only occasionally, but it seemed obvious that “that woman loved that man. She did what she was supposed to do. She married this man and she stood by him.”

Dixon, his son and daughter-in-law and a few friends somberly watched on television Wednesday as Bakersfield police announced Brothers’ arrest. As the temperature approached 100 degrees outside, the group sat inside the small ranch house in south Bakersfield, dimmed but for the glow of the TV.

Dixon said he was willing to give Brothers the benefit of the doubt. But he asked, “If the guy didn’t do this, then who did it? And why? That’s the scariest thing about all this.”

Early Wednesday, Bakersfield police had soft-pedaled their interest in Brothers, saying that they needed to speak to him before they could eliminate him as a suspect. Mahan said investigators were considering the possibility that the killings were committed during a home invasion robbery, a crime typically committed by a stranger.

But by mid-day, Mahan and other police officials were sounding increasingly confident that Brothers was the killer.

“At certain stages of an investigation, you have to make certain decisions,” Mahan told reporters after announcing the arrest -- and before Brothers’ release.While declining to discuss the evidence, Mahan did say that police had served search warrants at the crime scene and at Brothers’ Bakersfield apartment. They also had seized two cars registered to Brothers.

One, a blue Chevy pickup, was found Tuesday at the Airport Bus of Bakersfield terminal, which provides transportation to Los Angeles International Airport. The other, a Mercedes-Benz, was found at a 24 Hour Fitness center in southwest Bakersfield, where Brothers often worked out.

Mahan said police were trying to determine how long the Mercedes had been parked at the gym on Gosford Road. Police said they also did not know how long the pickup had been at the bus terminal in central Bakersfield. Mahan said Brothers had been seen there on July 2, four days before the family was last seen alive.

Asked when Brothers left for North Carolina, a police spokeswoman, Mary Degeare, said investigators were still piecing together his travel itinerary with help from other agencies, including the FBI. Mahan said Brothers had gone to police in Elizabeth City after family members told him he was being sought for questioning about the killings.

Police said they had not found the murder weapon, and that Brothers was not a registered gun owner.

On Wednesday evening, shortly before the announcement of Brothers’ release, an NBC-TV affiliate from Norfolk, Va., was allowed into the A. Parker Midgett municipal building in Elizabeth City, where Brothers was in a small holding cell.

The station’s videotape showed him sitting on a white bench wearing a blue T-shirt and khaki shorts behind a mesh screen. Upon seeing the television camera crew, he appeared to become agitated and quickly headed for the bathroom in the cell, disappearing behind the door. He remained there until the television crew left.

*

Fellers reported from Los Angeles, and Cardenas and Fausset from Bakersfield. Times staff writers Mitchell Landsberg in Los Angeles, John Johnson and Jia-Rui Chong in Bakersfield and Steve Hymon in North Carolina also contributed to this report.