Twenty years later Carmina Salcido still vividly remembers her 4-year-old sister Sofia trying to protect her. She remembers her father's eyes when he came for baby Teresa.
She remembers the deadly silence that followed as he walked away.
"He was in a hurry to do what he was going to do," Carmina Salcido said.
On April 14, 1989, Ramon Salcido, 28, embarked on a killing spree that shattered the solace of the Sonoma, Calif., wine country, horrified the rest of the country, It ripped apart Carmina's life before it had really begun.
Her father had been drinking and doing drugs the night before. He loaded his kids in his car and looked for his wife, Angela, whom he suspected was having an affair with a co-worker at Gran Cru winery. He slashed his children with a butcher knife and left them at the county dump. When he was done, he had killed Carmina's sisters, her mother and four others.
He slashed Carmina's throat, and she lay there for 36 hours, bleeding, clinging to life. She was 3.
Carmina is 23 now and trying to restart her life. She is speaking publicly about her story because she wants to give others hope.
"I think there is a reason I survived and that's to tell my story, to show that people can live through the horrible things that can happen," she said.
Salcido has told her story to friends, in therapy and now in a book, "Not Lost Forever: My Story of Survival" On Friday, ABC's "20/20" will air a segment on her life story.
Carmina believes in good and evil spirits and their constant battle. "That day evil won," she said.
The murders were only the beginning of her incredible journey, which includes a childhood in a strict religious sect and a year in a convent when she considered becoming a cloistered nun.
"I don't think telling it is ever going to get any easier," she said, her eyes tearing.
Salcido spoke with The Bee in the living room of her modest Sonoma apartment, where a photo of her late mother hangs over the TV set.
The resemblance between the two women is striking. Both have the same bright eyes, the same complexion, and the same determined expression on their faces. Carmina is the age her mother, Angela Salcido, was when she was killed.
"People have told me I look like her," Carmina said, her face lighting up. "My uncle told me we have the same laugh."
She still struggles to understand what happened to her family. Authorities said her father, Ramon, was high on drugs when he went on his rampage and that he committed the murders because he believed his wife, then an aspiring model, was cheating on him.
The detective who worked on this case said the crime scenes were "unimaginable."
"There are some things that shouldn't happen on this earth," said Capt. Mike Brown, now retired from the Sonoma County Sheriff's Department. "It was beyond comprehension. We were going from one horrible crime scene to another."
Brown said everyone remembers the Salcido victims because there were so many. "But there were other victims as well."
Besides killing his wife and two young daughters, Ramon Salcido killed his mother-in-law, Louise Richards. He also raped and killed his two young sisters-in-law, Maria, 8, and Ruth, 12. Salcido also shot and killed Tracey Toovey, his boss at the winery.
He shot another worker, who survived, and he tried to shoot another person, but his gun jammed.
In her book, Carmina said "the only reason I was alive ... was that my head had fallen foward and kept my airway intact long enough for the blood to congeal and seal it off."
Ramon Salcido fled to his family's home in Los Mochis, Mexico, but was turned in by his sister. Mexican authorities, who normally deny extradition of Mexican nationals in death penalty cases, nonetheless handed him over to U.S. authorities.
Charles Schulz, the late Peanuts cartoonist who lived in Sonoma County, gave the sheriff's department use of his private jet to bring Salcido back.
Ramon Salcido was convicted in November 1990 of multiple murders and other crimes and sent to death row at San Quentin State Prison.
E-mail reporter Jennifer Garza at jgarza(at)sacbee.com.
(Distributed by Scripps Howard News Service, www.scrippsnews.com.)
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