Relative of Riverbank stabbing victims speaks up

OAKDALE — Four boys are learning to live without their parents. The boys and their three cousins are still reeling from the death of their grandmother.

The man authorities say is responsible, the children's uncle, Riverbank resident Jesse Frost, 38, remains in custody.

An Oakdale woman who lost her mother, sister and brother-in-law in the deadly attack in Riverbank last month said Thursday that it was time to remember the victims and set the story straight.

Her brother, Jesse Frost, she said, was no "gentle giant," as former wrestling coaches and teammates at Riverbank High and Modesto Junior College remember him.

"He was a bully," said Kimberly Gonsalves, 41. "He just had so much anger inside him."

Frost, she said, attacked their mother twice. In 2003, over a fight about cigarettes, Gonsalves got between them, she said, as Frost was "beating my mother into the corner of the couch."

Frost has pleaded not guilty to three counts of murder in the deaths of his mother Donna Norton, 62; Norton's daughter and his sister, Judy Niemi, 37; Niemi's husband, Tony, 38; and one count of attempted murder in the attack on his nephew Matthew James, 18. Frost's public defender declined to be interviewed for this story.

Gonsalves said she'll remember her mother as a tough woman who raised four children mostly on her own. Norton worked at a cannery and on her father's turkey farm, and later studied to become a respiratory therapist. She battled breast cancer in 2007; after having surgery in April of that year, she was back to work that December.

"And she was taking chemo and radiation during that time. She lost all her hair," Gonsalves said. "She just wore a scarf on her head and went to work."

Gonsalves said her sister Judy Niemi was her best friend. They talked several times a day, discussing problems with kids or with their mom.

Niemi, the youngest of Norton's children, was a devoted mother, the kind of woman even the neighbor's kids would visit to have an "owie" bandaged or to play.

"The little next-door kids, they would come and say, 'Judy, Judy,' and jump in her arms and hug her," Gonsalves said. "She just loved all kids."

Niemi also cared for her mother when Norton had cancer. The women were so close, Gonsalves said, her siblings teased Niemi that she would still sleep in her mother's bed if she could.

Niemi's husband was a mechanic who could "fix anything, make you anything you want," Gonsalves said, like the shelves he built all the way around his nephew Matthew's room. He set up a train track so the train would go around the room. He wouldn't hesitate to fix a broken skateboard, bike or car that friends or neighbors brought him.

"It didn't bother him if the kids interrupted him," Gonsalves said. "He would stop what he was doing and fix it."

The couple were raising four boys, the oldest from Judy Niemi's previous marriage. Brett, 16, now lives with his dad. The other three, Ronnie, 14, Emmett, 10, and Cole, 6, moved in with Gonsalves in Oakdale. She said she and her sister agreed that should anything happen to either woman, the survivor would take in the other's children.

"We raised our kids together," Gonsalves said. "We wanted them to be together, to know each other."

The Niemis lived with Norton; Ima Frost, Gonsalves' surviving sister; and Ima Frost's teenage son, Matthew, at Norton's home on Arcaro Drive in Riverbank. Jesse Frost also lived in his mother's home.

The cousins hung out at the home all the time. Gonsalves' daughter, Stephani, 17, had spent the night of Feb. 14 at her grandmother's home. Gonsalves said she picked up her daughter hours before the attack. She was in Oakdale on her way to feed livestock when she got a call from Ima Frost.