MERCED -- In a horrific struggle between good and evil, a 9-year-old girl pleaded with a naked intruder who invaded her family's rural home and terrorized her siblings with a pitchfork. Ashley Carpenter was screaming, "Stop it, don't hurt my sister" when the attacker, Jonathon David Bruce, turned the weapon on her. Bruce pinned Ashley's small body to the wall and stabbed her to death as she fell to the floor, begging for her life. Bruce also killed Ashley's 7-year-old brother, John William, as he lay sleeping in his parents' bed. This was the scene that unfolded Wednesday morning in rural Merced County during a crime that is as horrific and inexplicable as any the Valley has ever seen. It could have been far worse but, bleeding from dozens of puncture wounds, Anna, 13, and Vanessa, 11, escaped from the house shortly after the oldest sister, Jessica, 14, fled to a neighbor's house for help. Deputies responding to the emergency shot and killed Bruce, 27, when he rushed at them with the pitchfork. Anna told her father later as she lay in a Merced hospital: "Ashley saved my life, Dad." "I've got three daughters alive," said John Carpenter, the children's father. "There are people who have had it worse, who come home to nothing." Said the Rev. John Hilton, great-uncle to the children and pastor of the family's church: "There are two major forces in the world, and that's good and evil. This family is good. Ashley was good. Transcript from Jessica Lynne Carpenter's call to 911 "That man was ruled by evil." One day after the killings, Merced and the Central Valley was trying to make sense of the senseless. Thursday morning, Merced County authorities identified Bruce using fingerprints and tattoo information from a statewide law enforcement database. Merced County sheriff's officials said Bruce had been arrested twice in the past year. The first time, in 1999, he was charged with assaulting a police officer, resisting arrest and being under the influence of a controlled substance. The second arrest was last month on an outstanding warrant. Merced County Sheriff/Coroner Tom Sawyer said he didn't have personal knowledge of Bruce. But judging by his behavior at the Carpenters' home, Sawyer said, a good guess is that Bruce was high on methamphetamine or PCP at the time of the killings. Sawyer said it will probably be several weeks before toxicology tests on Bruce are finished. He said he thought Bruce might have been high on drugs as soon as heard the crime's horrific details: "There are some things we will probably never know that was in his mind." Sawyer said investigators will try to determine why Bruce was in the Carpenters' neighborhood and whether he had driven there or if someone else had dropped him off in the area. Funeral plans for the two victims were not firm Thursday, pending the release of their bodies after autopsies are completed. Anna, who hospital officials said was recovering well from her puncture wounds, left Sutter Merced Medical Center Thursday morning. The family moved into a friend's home in Merced and was surrounded by dozens of their extended family and fellow church members. Family members and Merced residents praised the courage of the girls, who were confronted with an inconceivable life-and-death situation in their own home. Davene Taylor, John Carpenter's cousin, spent Wednesday night at the hospital, listening as the girls recounted the killings. When John and Tephanie Carpenter, both 34, left the home sometime after 8 a.m. Wednesday, all five children were slumbering. Tephanie Carpenter told Anna and Vanessa, who had been awake earlier that morning, that she was taking the family van to the mechanic and would be home shortly. John William had crawled into his parents' bed and was asleep there. Ashley was sleeping in her room. Jessica was still lounging in her bedroom around 9 a.m. when she heard a commotion and thought her mother had returned. She went to the living room and found Bruce, nude. He had pushed a sofa, bookshelves and chairs against the walls and doors to seal himself and the children in the house. Confused by what she saw, Jessica ran back to her bedroom, bolted the door and picked up the phone to dial for help. The line was dead. Then she heard a cry. "Right then, she knew something was wrong," Taylor said. Jessica could not have conceived of what was occurring in her sisters' room on the other side of the house. Bruce had stormed into the bedroom shared by Anna, 13, and Vanessa, 11. He jabbed at them with the pitchfork as they cowered on a bed. Anna kept her arms raised to shield herself and her sister while Bruce stabbed her in the hands and legs. "He looked possessed," Anna said later. After Ashley ran into the room and Bruce attacked her, Anna and Vanessa escaped from the room and squeezed through a laundry room door that Bruce had partially blocked with a bookshelf. They could hear Bruce from behind the door, saying, "Come back, I will be nice to you," as they slipped through a window. On the other side of the house, Jessica crawled from her window and passed the nearest house to go for help at the neighbors she knew best. No one was home, so she bolted for Juan Fuentes' house and saw Anna, who was bleeding from puncture wounds, and Vanessa running toward her. It's not clear when Bruce killed John William. Family members prayed Thursday he was asleep during the attack. "We're not really sure what happened to John William," Taylor said. "Nobody saw him." Merced residents asked: Who could do this to children? Bruce's life clearly had started to unravel in his final months. His last known home was a duplex apartment in the 200 block of West 20th Street in central Merced. It is an older, tree-lined section of town that has seen better days. Residents describe themselves as working folks living in an area struggling to overcome the growing presence of illegal drugs. Raymond Adams, 57, and his wife, Ann, 62, were Bruce's neighbors in the duplex for nearly a year. They said Bruce and a woman about his age moved from Bakersfield with her two young sons into the backyard apartment in 1999. Bruce was hardly an ideal neighbor. "If you said 'hi' to him, he might say 'hi' to you or he might not say anything," Raymond Adams said. But the arrangement was at least tolerable as long as the boys' mother was around, Ann Adams said. The boys often played with the Adams' three great-grandchildren, who were about the same age. The two apartments share a common yard and cement patio. Then, last fall, the woman and her sons suddenly moved out. The woman said she wanted a life, that Bruce was too strict with her children and didn't want to go anywhere, Ann Adams said. That is when Bruce's already erratic, anti-social tendencies began to worsen, the Adamses said. He began staying out most of the night and sleeping all day. He became angry and surly when their great-grandchildren awakened him by riding their tricycles on the patio. Bruce complained about the children to the duplex's landlord. The Adamses quickly distanced themselves from Bruce. "We kept the great-grandchildren under supervision because he didn't like them," Ann Adams said. "Some people around here thought he was a little creepy." Raymond Adams said several neighbors saw Bruce talking to trees. Not long after the woman and boys moved out, he said, Bruce was fired as a telemarketing salesman with a Merced company. Yet Ann Adams said she was still stunned to hear Bruce had killed the two Carpenter children, then was killed himself by sheriff's deputies. "He was a wart," Ann Adams said. "But I didn't think he was a killer. I didn't like him. I was glad to see him move away. But this blew me away." Bruce didn't move; he was kicked out July 31 for being behind in rent and trashing the apartment, said Dave Shewey, who manages the duplex for Rental Management Inc. Bruce owed $1,500, in part because he had punched numerous holes in the apartment's walls and caved in two doors, Shewey said. An uncle of the two victims said Bruce was a stranger to the Carpenters. Talking about his two youngest children, John Carpenter called them "my babies and my buddies." Of Ashley he said: "She had the these little black eyes that just sparkled." "Ashley loved life, and she was robbed," Tephanie Carpenter said during a news conference at the hospital Thursday morning. Family members said Ashley and John William were the best of friends. "You never saw one without the other," Taylor said. "John William was very quiet and Ashley was feisty, but they were always together." As was the whole family, who spent all their time with relatives and close friends from their church. "It was so beautiful to watch this family," Hilton said. John and Tephanie met at the church as youngsters, fell in love, married and raised all five of their children in the congregation, Hilton said. "They are people of God," he said. "But as a pastor and as an uncle, I'm without words. I don't know what to say to them to explain this. It's just a horrible atrocity that we'll never get over." The only shred of solace that Tephanie Carpenter has is that the killer of her children is dead. "We're thankful he won't come back." The Associated Press contributed to this report. 911 Call Excerpts (Published August 25, 2000) Portions of the telephone conversation between an emergency dispatcher and 14-year-old Jessica Carpenter, who escaped to a neighbor's house after a man broke into her home and killed two siblings with a pitchfork: Operator: 911 what is your emergency? Jessica: Can I have the police please? O: This is 911 ma'am. What do you wish to report? J: There's somebody in our house we don't know. O: Somebody is in your house that you don't know? J: Yes. O: Are they they there now? J: Yes, they are stabbing my brother and sister with a pitchfork. O: They are stabbing your brother and sister with a pitchfork right know inside the house? J: Yes. You have to be careful. He's going to kill them. O: You don't know who this man is? J: Uh-uh, I went in my bedroom and I went out and I just woke and he was getting dressed. --- O: OK, hold on just a minute. OK, you don't know who this guy is. He just broke in your house with a pitchfork and started stabbing your brother? J: Well, first he closed everything up. O: He went into the house and closed everything up? J: Yeah, he had furniture on the walls and stuff. O: He what? ... I'm sorry he what? J: He has the furniture over by the windows has everything up, and my little brother and sister are in there. O: OK, hold on just a moment, please. Let me start a police unit over there. ... OK, I want you to stay on the phone with me. Do not hang up the phone. ... Can I have your name? J: Jessica. O: Jessica. J: Carpenter. O: How old are you, Jessica? J: I am almost fifteen. O: You're fourteen? J: Uh-huh. --- O: OK, how many people are in the house with this guy? J: Just those two, my little brother and sister. O: How old is your little brother? J: Seven. O: He is stabbing your seven year old brother? J: Uh-huh. Well, that is what my sister said. O: How old is your sister? J: Going to be 10. O: She is 9, right? ... OK, I want you to discribe this guy for me, OK? Is he white, Hispanic, black? J: No, he is white. O: OK, about how old is he? Would you say he's twenty, twenty-five, thirty, thirty-five? Just a guess, just guess about how old he is. J: Uh, probably 30. O: Do you remember what he looked like? J: He has brown hair and a mustache. O: OK, brown hair? J: Uh-huh. O: OK, do you know what he was wearing? J: He wasn't. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------- ---- RMNEWS COMMENTS: Merced is a medium size town that is called the gateway to Yosemite. Castle Air Force Base is located in Merced. In 1972 Merced made headlines when Steven Stayner was kidnapped by a pedophile who molested him for seven years. Last year Stayner's older brother killed four women in Yosemite. He decapitated at least two of them and burned their bodies in their car. Taken together as a symptom of something much larger, I would suspect a satanic cult or a mind control experiment is taking place in Merced. This is an excerpt from the following article: "Merced has seen its share of tragic, high-profile crimes. In December 1972, Merced elementary school student Steven Stayner was kidnapped and remained missing for seven years until he escaped from his abductor. Last year, Cary Stayner, Steven's older brother, was accused of brutally murdering three Yosemite sightseers and a naturalist." ###