BAKERSFIELD, Calif. — A jury yesterday recommended the death penalty for a former elementary school vice principal convicted of murdering his estranged wife, three children, and mother-inlaw.

Vincent Brothers, once a well-respected mentor in this central California city, was convicted May 15 of five counts of first-degree murder and the special circumstance of committing multiple murders.

Brothers, 44, had claimed he was in Columbus, Ohio, visiting his brother when his family was shot to death in their home after returning from church.

Prosecutors argued that he flew to the Midwest to establish an alibi, then drove more than 2,000 miles back to Bakersfield in a rental car to kill the five in July 2003.

The victims were Brothers’s wife, Joanie Harper, 39; mother-in-law Earnestine Harper, 70, and children Marques, 4, Lyndsey, 2, and Marshall, 6 weeks. The bodies of Joanie Harper and the two children were found on her bed, the infant was under pile of bedclothes, and the mother-in-law had been shot at near point-blank range in a hall, authorities said.

Brothers’s formal sentencing by Superior Court Judge Michael Bush was set for September 27.

Brothers’s supporters said they would help him appeal and questioned the judge’s decision to dismiss the only black juror during the trial.

“He was not tried in a jury of his peers. That just doesn’t happen in Kern County,” said the Reverend Wesley Crawford, first vice president of the local NAACP chapter.