"I Felt Trapped": Why Two Brothers Pleaded Guilty to Manslaughter

This article is supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism. It’s the second half of a story about the potential wrongful prosecution of two brothers. Read the first part right here.  

Kenyon and Kishawn Norbert were kept in separate San Francisco jails. For the first three and a half years that they waited in pretrial detention, Kishawn made fast friends with anybody who talked to him, says Montrail Brackens, a longtime pretrial detainee who has shared cells with each of the brothers at different times and considers them friends. He was always up for a game of cards or basketball in the indoor rec area. Kishawn also took substance abuse classes and started meditating, according to notes a social worker wrote.

In December 2017, a routine hearing was scheduled in Judge Brendan Conroy's courtroom. Kenyon and Kishawn were seeing each other for the first time in a month and tried to shake each other's hands. "You're not allowed to touch," Kishawn said the bailiff yelled out before pushing him. Kenyon was provoked.

"He was like, 'Hey don't touch my little brother.' Trying to be my protector," Kishawn said. A fight broke out between the brothers and the bailiff. . 

The prosecutor's office wrote in court filings that "both defendants assaulted the bailiff and the courtroom was cleared." Sheriff's deputy Rolando Blandon, identified by Kishawn as the bailiff involved, declined an interview request through a sheriff’s spokesperson. 

News of the fight spread throughout the jail. “So you mean to tell me that when they're in court, that they can't shake each other's hands, give each other a hug, have any kind of physical contact?” Brackens says. 

Kishawn was placed in administrative segregation indefinitely, losing access to the jail's limited programming and socializing. Kenyon was already spending months on and off in isolation. The conditions made it harder for them to review evidence or contact their lawyers, and Brackens noticed a change in Kenyon over the years. He "became more secluded. He spent a lot of time by himself in ad-seg. After so many years, he was a different person."

Meanwhile, the confidential witness Richard Allen had a fortuitous encounter with Kishawn. Allen was arrested on robbery charges in 2016 and sat in pretrial detention until 2017. 

“We were in jail at the same time,” Allen said of him and the Norbert brothers. After learning from Kishawn that his police interview was used to prosecute the brothers for murder, he said he wrote a letter to help them. Allen said he decided to do this on his own, and that he was never threatened in any way, contradicting the assertion by police and prosecutors that the Norberts were threatening witnesses.

In our interview, Allen tried to recall what he said in the letter. "I went on record that the police were lying," Allen told me. 

The Norberts remember the letter too. But they don’t know where the letter is today. Keyon said he initially passed it along to one of his court-appointed defense attorneys. But the letter isn't mentioned in any of the court records that I reviewed. Allen told me he had also reached out to attorneys on the Norbert case when he was incarcerated and remembered one defense attorney interviewing him afterwards (he didn't remember the attorney’s name). He was never called to testify in front of a judge.

Allen was sentenced to prison for his own robbery case without knowing whether his letter would have made any difference. 

(Two of the court-appointed attorneys who more represented Kenyon and Kishawn, Lisa Dewberry and Malcolm Smith, said they could not give interviews without written permission directly from their former clients. Another court-appointed attorney who represented Kenyon named Peter Furst did not respond to my questions as of publishing time. Matt Gonzalez, the public defender who previously represented Kishawn, declined an interview request). 

In 2018, the court-appointed lawyers for Kenyon and Kishawn filed different motions attempting to get the charges against them tossed. Kishawn's lawyer Malcolm Smith accused prosecutors of misconduct for the secret preliminary hearing sessions where Allen’s testimony had been discussed. He wrote in court filings that SFPD Inspectors Carl Bonner and Leonard Broberg, the police officers who lead the homicide investigation, "are willing to exaggerate, embellish and manufacture evidence." Kenyon's attorney Peter Furst said in filings that Kenyon wanted to go to trial soon and that his constitutional right to a speedy trial was being violated. 

"The likelihood of a settlement in this case is as close to nil as can be imagined," Furst wrote in August 2018. "No, this case must and will be tried."

But not long after, Furst withdrew as Kenyon's attorney altogether for an undisclosed medical issue. Once again, the brothers faced an indefinite waiting period so a new court-appointed lawyer could have time to prepare. 

San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Heather Trevisan asked to delay or “continue” the case several times in 2018. Then the SFDA’s office replaced its prosecutor on the case. In September 2018, Assistant District Attorney Nathan Quigley, the latest prosecutor to take over, wrote that he needed to delay an upcoming hearing for Kenyon and Kishawn because he hadn't had a chance to review their legal motions.

In 2019, Kenyon and Kishawn were part of a class-action lawsuit describing inhumane conditions in San Francisco's jails, including going years without sunlight or fresh air. The suit resulted in a historic ruling that inmates at the jail more than a year should be provided a minimum of 15 minutes sunlight each day. 

“Even though we're in jail, we shouldn't just be treated like less than human. We should still have a fair chance,” Kenyon said. “We sit in these county jails, we're bullied, we're pushed over, we're talked to crazy, we're mishandled, we're mistreated. It’s sad, and it's not right."

Back at the criminal courthouse, none of the attempts the defense attorneys made to get the case tossed were successful. Judge Braden Woods finally ruled on the prosecutorial motion in October 2019 and dismissed it. With other options running out, a murder trial seemed imminent. 

But at the next hearing in November 2019, the District Attorney's office said they were busy with another homicide trial and asked to delay the Norbert case. A new court date was set for January 2020 and then for February 2020. Court minutes show the case was delayed again until March 2020, but they do not provide a reason for the additional delay. 

In March 2020, court hearings started getting cancelled for everyone. The pandemic created a disastrous backlog in the criminal courthouse. The Norberts' next hearing was put off until October 2020. Then it was delayed repeatedly until April 2021. Quigley, the prosecutor, blamed the delays on “the extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic,” according to court records.

The trial was rescheduled for June 4, 2021. But when that date approached, the prosecutor asked to delay the case until June 11 because he was busy with another homicide trial. He said the same thing on June 25 and July 16.

The trial was rescheduled for July 29, 2021. But then the prosecutor said that police officers who would be called as witnesses had "preplanned travel arrangements" and wouldn't be available. The judge approved another delay. 

Ahead of the new trial date in August 2021, the prosecutor filed an opposition to a ballistics expert that Kishawn's lawyer planned to call as a witness, claiming that prosecutors hadn't received any discovery about it. That meant another delay. Kishawn's lawyer said information on the expert could easily be found online and accused prosecutors of withholding discovery about their own witnesses for months. 

“We are well within 30 days of trial and you have proposed no witnesses for trial,” Kishawn’s lawyer wrote to the prosecutor in an August 2021 email.

"We were planning a trial, but it never seemed like they were going to give us a trial. They were going to drag it out as long as they could," Kenyon said.

Kenyon’s perception is backed by some data. As of May 2026, San Francisco jails are holding 110 people who have been there for three years or longer without trial, according to figures provided by the Sheriff’s Department in a public records request. A total of 313 people have been in pretrial detention for at least one year. Some defendants have been waiting as long as 14 years. 

“This is a pattern. You got people that have been up here for 12, 13, 14 years in the county jail, fighting for their freedom, fighting for their lives through the court system,” Kenyon said. 

Something finally changed in September 2021. Kenyon and Kishawn remember being told that the District Attorney was suddenly willing to offer them a better plea deal. Each brother could plead guilty to manslaughter charges, which tend to carry less severe sentences than murder charges. The offer came with 25 years in prison, but included credit for the time they already served and the possibility of parole in seven years. 

It "was not a good deal at all when you really think about it," Kenyon said. "But it was the best thing we could do because it was kind of scary, the outcome of going to trial and losing our lives for this whole situation." If they went to trial, they each faced two consecutive life sentences.

Kishawn also didn't see another way out. "I felt trapped,” he said. “It's supposed to be a jury of your peers, but it's never a jury of your peers. I was scared to go to trial with a public defender and lose and get life.” 

And so that was how Kenyon and Kishawn decided to plead guilty to killings they say they had nothing to do with. After seven years, they agreed to stop fighting to prove their innocence. They would never get to present their case in front of a jury. 

The San Francisco District Attorney’s office said in a statement: “Kenyon and Kishawn Norbert’s case was resolved in 2021 when they each pleaded guilty, with the advice of counsel, to two counts of voluntary manslaughter with the use of a firearm and one count of robbery. They were each sentenced to 25 years in State Prison and admitted that they each personally used a firearm during the commission of one of the homicides.”

But today Kenyon and Kishawn both say that they are innocent. 

Kishawn “pleaded under the duress of spending the rest of his life in prison," a post-conviction attorney would later write in court filings. “It is not surprising that an innocent defendant…would accept a plea disposition to lesser crimes in order to avoid being convicted of murders they did not commit."

Kenyon and Kishawn faced sentencing in November 2021. The weak evidence and the years their defense teams spent picking apart the case didn’t seem to amount to much. The survivors of Keith Zinn and Willie Cain made it clear that they believed the prosecutors. Cain’s mother told the brothers that they were killers.

“My heart is heavy for my son little Willie who you killed and took from me on July 7, 2014,” she said in a letter read aloud by a social worker. 

Kenyon prepared a statement that he read himself. He thanked his lawyers for their help and the San Francisco prosecutor's office for offering a deal. He called the last seven years a “nightmare” and told his wife and his mother that he never would have survived without either of them. 

"If you guys don't learn anything else from me please learn from my errors, wrongs and mistakes because what we done and do was and is wrong,” he told his children. 

To the victims' family members, Kenyon wrote an apology: "I take full responsibility for the lives lost and if I could turn back the hands of time and do it all over again, but this time differently, I would without a second thought, because neither Willie nor Keith deserved to die. I'll forever be hurt, broken, saddened, remorseful and solely to blame for their deaths."

That statement could be interpreted as an admission of guilt, or simply as a way to protect Kishawn. Police never said which of the two brothers they believed was the shooter. Instead the brothers were prosecuted under the theory of felony murder, a legal doctrine that allows the state to charge people for deaths they did not directly cause. ("It wasn't me admitting, it was me forgiving the people who did this to us," Kenyon says now. "And when I say us I don't mean just Kishawn and myself. I meant Willie Cain, Keith Zinn, their families, as well as ours”).

When the hearing was over, the brothers were each sentenced to 25 years as promised, with the possibility of parole seven years away. 

"I love you more than words can ever express,” Kenyon read aloud to Kishawn in court. "I know you looked up to me and would follow me through to the ends of earth, and instead of moving correctly so you could follow my greatness, I led you wrong and astray. And in life, that's my biggest disappointment and regret."

Kywanna Reed is now a busy great-grandmother and owner of a daycare business with a comfortable house in the North Bay, but when she had Kenyon and Kishawn, she was an impoverished teenager living in the Sunnydale Housing Projects. It was the 90s, the middle of the gun violence and crack epidemics. When Kenyon was 3 and Kishawn was 2, they stepped out of the home one night and walked into a scene of people screaming and crying. Their father had just been killed in a shooting. 

As the boys grew older, Reed worked full-time as a county clerk in San Francisco and didn’t know how to keep Kenyon and Kishawn out of trouble in the streets. One day at football practice, Kishawn remembered that Kenyon “showed me money, drugs, and a gun. I gave up sports to do the wrong things with him,” according to notes from a social worker in his case file. Kishawn "became attracted to the lifestyle of Kirkwood gang members," the social worker wrote.

At age 12, Kishawn was arrested for the first time for possession of a stolen car and a firearm. The brothers spent their teen years cycling through juvenile hall. From there, San Francisco probation officers sent Kishawn to Glen Mills, a reform school in Pennsylvania that was eventually shut down for beating its students. Kishawn felt like he was "mentally always in jail. Even when I was out," he told the social worker. “The way I brush my teeth, use the bathroom, wake up early, it's like I was always in jail.”

To his mother, Kishawn was a sensitive athlete who always wore his heart on his sleeve, with an outgoing personality similar to her own. "We're people people," she said.

Kenyon could be seen as stand-offish by people who didn't know him well and thoughtful to the people who did. "Kenyon, he helped me realize that at times, I can be quick to speak," said Brackens, his former cellmate.

"Kishawn, he's still into cars, me and him talk about cars all the time. He is a rapper, he writes. He's like his dad, he's very talented with a pen," Reed said. "Kenyon loves to read. In prison, he's always in some kind of class. He's into all kinds of literature."

In 2022, Kenyon and Kishawn filed petitions to overturn their sentences, citing a state law passed shortly before they pleaded guilty that allows defendants who took plea deals a chance to be resentenced if they were prosecuted under the felony murder doctrine.

The Norberts' post-conviction petitions would be heard in the San Francisco Superior Court, the same courthouse where they waited seven years and four months for their murder trial that never happened. Running behind as always, San Francisco attorneys and judges took three years to settle on a date for the post-conviction hearing.

In January 2025, Kishawn was brought back from prison to the local jail so he could attend his long-awaited hearing in person. But six months later, the hearing was still getting delayed each month. The conditions in San Francisco jail hadn’t improved much since he was last there. Kishawn was gaining weight without access to a yard like in prison and said the jail was still keeping fluorescent lights on all day and night. But he remained optimistic about his upcoming court date. "If they look at all the evidence, the judge is going to be like, all right, this happened, this was wrong," Kishawn said in an interview at the jail. "Hopefully this judge is listening and seeing what's going on, with Blacks and Browns being in here, and us taking these deals because we feel we got to. "

Kishawn's hearing was finally set last September. It was short and anti-climactic. Kishawn's appointed post-conviction attorney Brian McComas said that the brothers were "subject to a very unusual preliminary hearing, where a vast majority of the evidence was sealed." 

Other than that, the strength of the evidence wasn't discussed in depth by Judge Bruce Chan or the lawyers. Instead, they stuck to case law about whether felony murder reforms could apply to Kishawn's situation in which he took a plea deal after the reforms already went into effect. "The request is denied," Chan said. Kishawn returned to prison. 

Kishawn was disappointed and still “trying to figure out what happened,” when his mother spoke to him afterward.  

Kenyon was being kept in administrative segregation at the San Francisco jail, awaiting his own long-delayed post-conviction hearing, when he gave an interview in the summer of 2025.  Sheriff's deputies would have required him to wear shackles for an in-person interview. He refused and opted to talk on the phone instead. 

“They just lock you down all day,” he said. 

After we talked, Kenyon's post-conviction hearing continued to get delayed for months afterward. He eventually decided to return to prison. In January 2026, he withdrew his petition altogether. The brothers will be eligible for a parole hearing in 2028.

"Hopefully you can find something that will help us in the long run, or just help somebody else in the long run," Kenyon said, "so that they don't have to go through what we went through."