Slaying Suspect Placed at LAX

BAKERSFIELD -- Vincent E. Brothers, the man identified by police as the suspect in the Bakersfield killings of his wife, her mother and his three young children, apparently left the city on a bus on the morning of July 2, four days before the victims were last seen alive, court documents revealed Thursday.

A bus manifest showed that Brothers got off the bus at Los Angeles International Airport later on July 2. Whether or when he may have boarded a plane has not been determined, according to an affidavit accompanying a search warrant obtained by Bakersfield police. The affidavit was filed Tuesday.

Where Brothers may have been when the five were killed, between Sunday and Tuesday morning, also has not been determined.

Whether he returned to Bakersfield before Tuesday night, when he walked into a police station in Elizabeth City, N.C., is not known. A friend of the family, Kelsey Spann, said he was told by Brothers’ wife that Brothers had been planning to visit relatives in the eastern United States, the affidavit says.

Brothers’ mother lives in North Carolina, and Bakersfield police said Thursday that information developed in Ohio had led them to reduce their suspicions about Brothers.

The officers declined to say what that information involved.

Brothers, who is an assistant principal at a Bakersfield elementary school, contacted school personnel the day the bodies were found and inquired about the homicides, the affidavit said. He did not contact police.

When Brothers went to the Elizabeth City police station the next day, he was arrested as a suspect in the killings. Hours later, Bakersfield police ordered that he be released. The prosecutor in Elizabeth City said Thursday he was mystified as to why.

“Five people are dead,” said Frank R. Parrish, district attorney for the 1st Prosecutorial District in North Carolina. “In my universe, that’s a consequential event we have to deal with.”

Parrish said he considers Brothers, 41, a flight risk.

“I’m gravely concerned,” Parrish said. “He’s unencumbered. If he wants to go to Paris, he can.”

But police in Bakersfield would say only that their suspicions about him have fluctuated, and they are not worried that he might flee. On Wednesday morning, a few hours after the bodies were found, detectives said they only wanted to speak to Brothers before eliminating him as a suspect.

Later that day, after deciding they had sufficient evidence to believe he killed his wife, Joanie Harper, 39; their three children Marques, 4, Lyndsey, 23 months, and Marshall, 6 weeks, as well as Harper’s mother, Ernestine Harper, 70, Bakersfield police asked that he be arrested. The husband and wife had been divorced but remarried in January.

Late Wednesday night, after receiving additional information from Ohio, Bakersfield police changed their minds and asked that he be released.

“It’s going to take some time to investigate that information,” Bakersfield Police Capt. Neil Mahan said Thursday.

“Those detectives had to make a decision on whether they were going to let him walk out of that door. They made a decision and they made the right decision.”

Bakersfield Police Chief Eric Matlock said he had asked his investigators to “slow it down a bit.”

“I want to make sure we get this thing right,” Matlock said. “The family deserves it and the community deserves it.”

The affidavit, filed about 12 hours after the bodies were found, provides only a few details about the case.

It says a security video at the Airport Bus terminal in Bakersfield captured Brothers buying a ticket shortly before 6 a.m. on July 2, though a manager at the terminal said she could not verify whether he boarded the bus. The bus left at 6 a.m. for a nonstop run to LAX. Brothers’ truck, a blue 1994 Chevrolet pickup, was found Thursday in the bus parking lot in Bakersfield.

The bus manifest indicated that Brothers got off the bus before noon July 2 at the United Airlines terminal at LAX, the affidavit said.

Shan Kern, who says she is Brothers’ former girlfriend and the mother of his 14-year-old child, told police she contacted Brother’s mother, Margaret M. Brothers, who lives in Elizabeth City, and was told that Brothers was expected to arrive for a visit at about 10 p.m. Tuesday.

Bakersfield police did not say where Brothers was thought to have been for six days before he walked into the Elizabeth City police station with his mother, and they did not say where he went after his release.

Mahan said detectives would be contacting Brothers’ attorney in an effort to get Brothers to talk to them. “What will raise our suspicion is if he doesn’t talk to us,” Mahan said.

When he appeared at the Elizabeth City station, Brothers said he wanted to talk about the killings. But after two Bakersfield detectives flew there to interview him, he refused to speak.

His attorney, Curtis E. Floyd of Bakersfield, said Thursday he hadn’t talked to his client. But Floyd said he had talked to police in Elizabeth City and planned to hold a news conference there today.

The victims’ bodies, all bearing wounds from a .22-caliber gun and possible stab wounds, were found in their home by a friend who had grown concerned after not seeing them since church services on Sunday.

No bloodstains or weapons from the crime scene were found at Brothers’ apartment, the affidavit says.

Police said they seized financial documents and photographs, but detectives declined to comment on them. Officers also seized a computer at a storage unit Brothers rented.

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Times staff writer Eric Malnic contributed to this report.