The home shows all the signs that a typical 7 year old girl lives there.

The tidy bedroom has a "101 Dalmations" bedspread, and an adjacent playroom is filled with toys.

Photos of Michelle McBride and her mother, Elizabeth, line the halls of the Citrus Heights home, and two pink bicycles sit in the garage awaiting the second-grader's return from school.

Only those intimately familiar with Michelle's life know the telltale signs of the unimaginable horror she has seen in her young life:

That the small metal net above her bed, which she calls her "dream catcher," was given to her to help stop the nightmares. That the small tears in the upholstery of the white Toyota Tercel in the driveway are bullet holes. That the passenger-side window of the car is the one she was pulled through by her father after he shot and killed her mother a year ago.

Only those who know Michelle best realize how far she has come since the unspeakable events of April 15, 1997 - and that the day her mother died before her eyes and her father later was gunned down by police will follow her forever.

"She'll probably be in therapy for the rest of her life," said her grandfather, Ed McBride, who is now raising Michelle in the same house where her mother grew up.

Elizabeth Phyllis McBride, 27, was Victim No. 14, one of 35 people killed in the Sacramento region in 1997 because of family violence.

But her daughter and numerous other children are among the uncounted victims of the siege of domestic violence that has continued in the area, and the effects upon such young minds are only now coming to light.

Experts on such cases say children react differently to seeing such horror; some become withdrawn while others act out and become aggressive.

Exposure to domestic violence, even in less severe cases, can chart the path the children will take as adults, either as abusers or potential victims.

And a study released Friday by the University of California, San Francisco, found that the IQ levels of children living in violent homes increased 10 to 25 points once they were separated from the abuser and given treatment.

Their concentration improved, their anxiety levels decreased and they displayed less aggressive behavior, according to the study by Alicia Lieberman, a child development specialist who presented her findings Friday to the annual convention of the American Psychological Association.

The findings are hardly surprising. People whose work brings them into contact with children who have been exposed to graphic violence say youngsters show incredible resiliency and an ability to handle such incidents.

But there have been few studies of such matters. Privacy restrictions - as well as a concern for protecting the children from their own pasts - make it difficult to track how such children ultimately respond to witnessing violence, especially between their own parents.

"We don't see the long-term effects," Sacramento Sheriff's Sgt. John McGinness said. "You can only imagine what kind of an impact it has on these kids long-term.

"It really seems that they don't grasp the significance of what they've just encountered," McGinness said, recalling his most recent case, in which 19 year old Jamie Lee Reed was shot to death last Monday while lying in bed with her 3 year old son.

The killer, Reed's ex-boyfriend and the father of their son, then shot himself to death. But it is impossible to say what impact the unspeakable acts Jack Bertrand Moser committed will have on the little boy.

"I don't think he (the child) had any real grasp of what kind of an atrocity he'd just seen," McGinness said. "And I imagine it'll take time for the devastating effects to set in."

The results depend upon many factors, including whether there was long-term abuse in the home and whether a child who survives such a horror has any family structure left.

"Some kids are resilient, but the severity of situations that kids go through, not all kids are going to be able to overcome some things," said David Ballard, executive director of the Sacramento Children's Receiving Home, where about 200 children a month are taken after being placed into protective custody.

While there has been enormous focus in recent years on preventing domestic violence between adults, the problems involving the children of such parents have not been ignored.

Various programs have sprung up over the years to help counsel such children, including therapy sessions by WEAVE - Women Escaping a Violent Environment - and instant response by police chaplains at crime scenes.

There also are long-term programs designed to help children deal with witnessing graphic violence, including the Children's Bereavement Art Group, which helps youngsters deal with their problems in small groups involving other children who have experienced losses.

For children who do not want to talk about what they've seen, the process gives them the opportunity to express themselves in other ways.

"Sometimes they don't say it in words, but they can put it in the pictures," said Peggy Gulshen, the program's coordinator. "Sometimes it's an image - where the car was, how the bullets entered the body, how the fire burned the bedroom. That's one of the first things, one of the first tasks of grief, is to accept the reality of what has happened."

For Michelle, who went through the program after she saw her mother killed, the therapy was vital, Ed McBride said.

Today, she is much like other little girls, but she is far from healed.

"She's very, very different from the way she was before," he said. "She's always vying for affection, she doesn't care who it is."

Sometimes, she will simply curl up in her grandfather's arms to be held, seeking an assurance that she will not lose him, too, he said.

She has benefited from being around a familiar environment, including living in the same home she shared with her mother most of her life and returning to the same school she was in before the tragedy.

She also has benefited from caring teachers and regular therapy sessions, McBride said. But she still has years of therapy ahead, particularly as she enters different developmental stages in her life.

"The child has witnessed all this," McBride said, "and when a child is witness to something like this, it is not something that they're going to get over in a few days."

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