Witnesses Describe Suspect's Rampage Before Carole Sturgis Killing

Witnesses say the first rampaged through several nearby homes, breaking down a neighbor’s wooden gate and swimming in another’s pool before ending up at Sturgis’s house.

It was there, sometime after 7:30 p.m., that Sacramento County Sheriff’s deputies apprehended a naked, bloodied Moses Stanley Trotter, 32, and discovered Sturgis’s body.

The incident began Sunday, around 7:00 p.m. when multiple neighbors say they saw Trotter running full-speed into the wooden gate of a 4900-block Durland Way home. The home’s owner, who identified himself only as Keith, told Fair Oaks Patch he heard a noise at his gate just as Trotter made his way into the backyard and then into his home.

“I couldn’t tell if he was on something or just a nut,” Keith said.

“When I dealt with him he was very passive; he was just kind of smiling,” Keith said. “When I was screaming at him to get out of my house, he said, ‘I’m just washing up.’”

“'Not in my house, you’re not,' I said.”

Keith said he escorted Trotter by the arm from his home and watched Trotter run to the house next door, where Phil Blottie has lived for five years. Blottie explained though he was not home at the time Trotter made his way in, it was apparent he’d been there.

“He broke this window and went inside,” Blottie said, pointing to a vertical window next to his front door.

Blottie said he came home around 7:30 p.m. to find that Trotter had turned on the TV and video game system and swum in his backyard pool, leaving a trail of blood, which Blottie guessed was the result of smashing through the front window.

Trotter then apparently made his way further down the street, to Sturgis’s home in the 7800 block of Olympic Way, where law enforcement authorities would find him at about 7:37 p.m.

It’s still unclear how Trotter was able to gain entrance to Sturgis’s home, said Sacramento County Sheriff’s spokesman Jason Ramos.  “Suffice it to say it was a very violent scene inside,” Ramos said, declining to give further details about the crime scene other than that items in the home in disarray.

Sturgis was pronounced dead at the scene, and the Sacramento County Coroner's office has classified the death as a homicide.

Ramos said there are no other suspects being investigated at this time.

“We don’t think anybody but Mr. Trotter is responsible for the crime that took place here,” Ramos said.

A toxicology report has been ordered, Ramos said, noting that at the time of Trotter’s arrest he appeared calm and lucid through the majority of the investigation.

“He wasn’t outspoken or verbose at all, but he pretty much cooperated once he was taken into custody; he didn’t struggle any further,” Ramos said. “There was no bantering or rambling.”

Sturgis’s neighbors described the 79-year-old woman as very nice and very cautious of those she didn’t recognize in her neighborhood.

“She was a single old lady,” said Larry Kamper, Sturgis’s neighbor of 40 years.

Kamper said Sturgis had been robbed twice in the past and had become more cautious in recent years, installing a metal gate in front of her front door.

“She wouldn’t even let me in,” Kamper said.

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