Uneasy Role as Survivor and Suspect

Vincent Brothers will attend the funeral of his slain wife, mother-in-law and children here today as a man in limbo.

To his lawyer, Brothers is a grieving husband and father. To the Bakersfield police, he remains the sole suspect in the killings, which they say are among the most gruesome in the city’s history.

Since Brothers returned from North Carolina last week, where he was briefly arrested the day after the bodies were discovered, then released, the 41-year-old elementary school vice principal has been technically free but shadowed by undercover police and journalists.

Many residents in this city of 247,000 are nervous that no one is in custody for the killing of Earnestine Harper, 70, her daughter Joanie, 39, and Joanie’s children Marques, 4, Lyndsey, 23 months, and Marshall, 6 weeks. Those who knew Brothers and the victims are also caught between their desire to prosecute the killer and concern that a respected educator eventually might be the man charged.

“Now everything’s cluttered in your head,” said Junea Davis, 38, a close friend of both Brothers and his wife. “I’m at a loss of words. I want to stay neutral.”

Leading the call to withhold judgment is the family of Earnestine Harper, a woman who had become well known locally for advocating on behalf of African American men who she said were commonly treated unfairly in the criminal justice system. Her sons, Eddie and Robert Harper, both ministers who are in town for the funeral, said they do not know their brother-in-law personally but are willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.

“We are not here as his judge,” said Eddie Harper, of Florida. “If he is innocent, it would be a travesty to judge him outside a court.”

Earnestine Harper was last seen in church with her daughter and grandchildren on Sunday, July 6. A friend discovered their bodies the following Tuesday.

That night, after news of the killings had spread across the country, Brothers walked into a police station in Elizabeth City, N.C., where he had been visiting his mother. Bakersfield detectives flew to meet him, but he refused to talk. They arrested him on suspicion of murder but released him because they did not have enough evidence to seek charges.

Some residents and attorneys have criticized Brothers’ arrest as hasty and said the police have focused too narrowly on one man. Attorney H.A. Sala, who is negotiating a retainer to represent Brothers, said Brothers was out of town between July 2 and July 11. The killings, he said, appear to have occurred July 6, between noon -- when the victims were seen at church -- and 6 p.m., when the family failed to return for evening services.

For now, Sala said, the focus on Brothers makes it difficult for the father and husband to properly grieve. In the long run, he said, it could permanently damage him. “It’s a stigma that will remain with anyone who is ultimately not charged or exonerated,” Sala said.

According to some friends, Brothers has spent years building a solid reputation as a tough but caring educator in the Bakersfield City School District. Friends said he arrived from the East Coast in the mid-1980s, working his way from student teacher to administrator.

“I still believe in his innocence until proven guilty,” said Donny Waddell, 41, whose three children attend Fremont Elementary School, where Brothers is a vice principal. “My feelings don’t change. I still respect the man, because he was good with children. Deep in my heart I pray that he didn’t do it.”

Police have not revealed whether they have determined Brothers’ whereabouts from July 2, when he boarded a bus from Bakersfield to LAX, to the morning of July 8, when the bodies were found. Nor have they revealed whether they know when the slayings occurred. Their suspicion of Brothers, they say, is based in part on his unwillingness to talk with them.

Some African Americans in Bakersfield understand why Brothers might be reluctant to speak to the police. The city’s racial history has been a troubled one. The Ku Klux Klan held a political grip on Bakersfield in the 1920s; and as late as the 1970s, the working-class, oilfield-strewn neighborhood of Oildale featured signs warning that no blacks were allowed.

Wesley Crawford-Muhammad, an activist and Muslim minister, said the climate for Bakersfield’s African Americans has improved somewhat in recent years -- for the first time, the police chief is a black man, Eric Matlock -- but he said the city still has a long way to go.

It has been difficult for Crawford-Muhammad and other black leaders to forget the trial of Offord Rollins IV, a black man and former high school All-American track star who was found guilty in 1992 of killing his girlfriend. Activists led by Earnestine Harper raised money to challenge the verdict, concerned about the lack of a murder weapon or witness and a jury of 11 whites and one Latino.

In 1995, an appeals court reversed the decision, based largely on jury misconduct.

“I don’t think [Brothers] will get a fair shot here in Kern County,” said Crawford-Muhammad, who is a friend of Brothers and was a friend of Earnestine Harper.

Others say Bakersfield has done a lot of growing up. Even in the rowdy bars of Oildale, a number of white customers shared the same concerns about Brothers’ fate as did Harper’s neighbors in the largely black area of central Bakersfield.

“Actually, I don’t see where they have anything on the man,” said Larry Hall, 59, last week at the Skylark Lounge. “Just because he’s a husband doesn’t make him guilty.”