SF Solved Two Murders in 24 Hours. It May Have Gotten the Wrong Men

This is part one in a two-part story supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism

For more than seven years, brothers Kenyon and Kishawn Norbert sat in San Francisco jail, charged with committing two murders and a robbery over the course of one morning. They maintained their innocence while being held on $10 million bail with seemingly no end in sight. 

The evidence against them was thin. There were no eyewitnesses who could identify them at the crime scenes. Police never found the murder weapons. Nor did they document gunshot residue on either Norbert brother that would indicate they had fired a gun. There was no evidence that the brothers had ever met the victims. One witness told me that San Francisco police pressured him to lie about seeing the brothers in a getaway car, and that he regrets ever cooperating in the investigation. A witness to the robbery could never identify the brothers in police lineups or in court. Surveillance footage doesn't capture the identity of the shooters. 

As the case dragged on for years, the evidence didn’t get any stronger. Kenyon and Kishawn told me in separate interviews that they didn’t want their trial to be put off indefinitely. They both said they had nothing to do with the robbery or the murders. 

There was “a lot of push off with the District Attorney, always trying to reschedule. Just one thing after another. It was always something that was pushing it off,” Kenyon said.

“It was just put it off, put it off, put it off, keep on putting it off,” Kishawn said.

The brothers eventually took plea deals after they said they lost hope of another way out. They later both filed petitions from prison hoping to overturn their sentences.   

Without a trial, the question of who murdered victims Willie Cain and Keith Zinn and what, if any, role the Norberts played may never be answered. They aren’t the only people who spent years in San Francisco’s derelict jails awaiting trial. More than 100 people currently in pretrial detention in San Francisco have been there at least three years. The case against the Norbert brothers highlights indifference in the San Francisco criminal justice system to the possibility that people could be wrongfully accused. 

“We will not be relitigating this case in the press,” the San Francisco District Attorney’s office responded to me as part of a statement that blamed excessive trial delays on defendants. “The defense controls the timeline of a case, they have a right to a speedy trial which they can waive to suit their purpose.”

But the court records tell a different story, one of a weak case delayed repeatedly by prosecutors and other factors the Norberts couldn't control.  

The key piece of evidence that got Kenyon and Kishawn arrested in the first place was their connection to a getaway car. 

A suspected gang war was behind nearly a dozen shootings over the long Fourth of July weekend in San Francisco’s Bayview neighborhood, and the San Francisco Police Department faced community pressure to make arrests. It was the Monday after that violent weekend, on July 7, 2014, when an officer spotted Kenyon and Kishawn in the neighborhood and decided to do a routine search. Kenyon, 22 at the time, was on parole for making criminal threats. Kishawn was 21 and his most serious conviction was for a home burglary. Police regularly searched Kenyon and Kishawn without warrants as a condition of their probation and parole. Their mother remembers Kenyon and Kishawn often disappearing and getting released from police custody hours later without their shoes, phones or clothes.   

“We got a long history in our neighborhood of getting in trouble, coming to jail, stuff like that. We really wasn't liked by the San Police Department at all,” Kenyon told me. 

Their upbringing in San Francisco was marked by violence and loss, including the murder of their father, and Kishawn wanted to leave. He told his probation officer that he hoped to move to Minnesota soon with his pregnant wife and their daughter. Kenyon was abusing opioids. Family members said that Keyon and Kishawn were inseparable and protective of each other.  

According to court records, SFPD officer Ali Migahsi remembered that the brothers were friendly, as they recognized him from previous searches, and that they didn’t try to run. They agreed to the search, and Migahsi soon found a key to a Dodge Charger in Kenyon’s pocket. Police located the car parked a few blocks away. Its license plate matched a Charger that was the getaway car in a homicide at 3 that morning and a robbery at 9:30 a.m. A Dodge Charger was also captured in surveillance footage leaving the scene of a second homicide at about 9 a.m. Police said the same car was used at all three of those violent crimes. And now, some eight and fifteen hours later, Kenyon was carrying the car key.

Kishawn told me that it was a "hood car," a stolen rental car available for anyone in the neighborhood to use. The car belonged to Hertz and was rented out with someone's stolen identity a month prior. According to police, Kenyon said he was borrowing the car from an “unidentified girlfriend” and didn't have it for more than an hour.  

At the police station, Kenyon agreed to talk. He seemed to be unaware that he and his brother were becoming the lead suspects in two murders. By the next day, local news stations were reporting that two brothers were arrested for the homicides of Keith Zinn, 30, and Willie Cain, 24. Police “cleared” the two homicides or made arrests in just one day. 

A man named Richard Allen was the only eyewitness who could place the Norberts in the car the morning of the murders. When I located him at the San Francisco jail in November 2025, he told me that his testimony was coerced. 

"I was basically agreeing and making stuff up to get out of there. I really wasn't thinking about it. My girl was six or seven months pregnant. Fastest way, just agree with what they were talking about."

Allen has a criminal history that includes a robbery conviction, but he was friendly and easy to talk to in person. By the time we talked, more than 11 years had passed since he was pulled over by the SFPD and questioned about the Norberts. In the jail's visitation area, Allen shared with me what he could remember from the police questioning. 

According to Allen's account, the police told him they were stopping him because he was driving recklessly. Then they took him to the station. He said that all he could think about was his pregnant girlfriend waiting for him at home. At the station, he recalled being interviewed by two officers but not their names. The officers seemed "agitated" and like "workhorses." 

"Really they're trying to get something," Allen said. 

He remembered the police officers having a story that they wanted him to confirm. But the story itself was forgettable. "They asked me to make things up. They said, 'You were over here, right?' I felt like they were steering it."

He said they warned him that his car could get stripped for parts. He remembered them saying: "We're just trying to help you get to your girl. We're trying to help you get your car back."

Allen said he didn't think much again about the police interview until he ran into one of the Norbert brothers in jail a few years later. He remembers one of the brothers asking him about his police interview, which was how he learned he was a confidential witness in their murder case. "I felt fucked up," he told me of learning the news. He was already on his way to prison, with limited access to the outside world, but he decided he would try to help Kenyon and Kishawn. "I'm going to try to make this right," he said.  

Carl Bonner, a veteran SFPD detective, led the investigation into the Norbert brothers. Before Allen’s identity was made public, Bonner wrote in an October 2014 report that a “confidential witness” saw three people in the Dodge Charger near the scene of the second murder that same morning. The witness allegedly identified two of the three people in the car as "Mookie" and "Nah Nah," the nicknames for Kenyon and Kishawn. 

 "Upon receiving the information, the patrol and plainclothes units of Bayview station were alerted of the updated information and advised that these subjects were detainable pending further investigation," Bonner wrote.

Bonner’s report is inconsistent with other facts of the case. Officer Migahsi testified that he stopped the Norberts to do a routine search, not because of anything a confidential witness said. More importantly, Allen allegedly told Bonner that he saw three people in the car, but the third person he named was never charged. 

Decades ago, Bonner was an SFPD narcotics inspector who openly criticized his department for failing to make arrests in the killings of Black men.

"Nothing is being done about the murders," Bonner said in a 2002 interview with the San Francisco Chronicle. "It's just the attitude, 'Let them kill themselves until they are extinct, or until it bleeds over into another community.'" 

In later years, Bonner moved up the ranks to become Inspector of Investigations, a role that put him in charge of homicides and other high-profile cases. Around the time the Norberts were arrested, the SFPD had improved its “clearance” or arrest rate for homicides from a low of 36 percent in 2011 to 60 percent in 2014, a figure matching the national average. But clearing a homicide only means that someone has been arrested, not convicted, so it doesn’t account for the possibility of wrongful arrests. 

Shortly after he and his brother were arrested, Kenyon agreed to talk to Bonner and SFPD homicide investigator Domenico Discenza at the police station. A partial transcript from the interrogation gives a view into Bonner's style. At 53, he was more than thirty years older than Kenyon, but he frequently called him “dude” as if they were peers.

"I just saying, you might turn out to be my best witness," Bonner said. The interview, Bonner said, was about "some stuff that has nothing to do with you."

The interrogation, as police interviews often are, was based on a number of lies. (A 1969 Supreme Court ruling, in Frazier v. Cupp, permits police to present false evidence). Police were trying to get Kenyon to confess only to driving to Bell’s Cleaners, a storefront down the street from where he was arrested. A customer named Cal Glenn said he was beaten and robbed of his jewelry that morning, shortly after the second homicide on July 7. Surveillance footage captured the attackers leaving in the Dodge Charger at the center of the case. But Glenn didn’t see his attackers because they hit him from behind. The owner of the cleaners who witnessed it, Alexander Bell, failed to identify the Norberts in police lineups. He said the attackers looked like brothers but had darker complexions and longer hair. 

Bonner repeatedly insisted to Kenyon that he was captured on surveillance footage at Bell’s Cleaners, without explaining why that mattered. 

"Let's get to the point, the person I saw in the video was you, ok," Bonner told Kenyon in the interrogation. "You're walking down third street minding your business, at this time this evening, the person I saw, there's a good chance he was you. Can we agree on that?"

"It might have been," Kenyon responded. "I'm just saying it probably could have been. It probably couldn't have been."

"Dude, you're like eating around the edges," Bonner said. "Dude, all I'm saying is there was an altercation there, you know you were there. I didn't say you participated. I didn't say what happened. We have other witnesses who gave statements already."

Bonner said that Kenyon's jacket matched the jacket of the person he saw on video. Kenyon seemed unconvinced. 

“You know how many jackets this is?” Kenyon said. 

"That jacket you’re wearing, that’s how I know. And other things I’ve seen,” Bonner insisted. “I know it was you and you were walking by.”

The truth was that the footage police had from the dry cleaners wasn't clear enough to identify anyone. The officers also didn’t mention to Kenyon that he was wearing a different colored t-shirt than the red one the suspect in the video appeared to be wearing that morning. (The discrepancy is noted in Bonner’s police report). 

Kenyon finally agreed that he was likely on the video, but just walking by to get a cigar from another store. But Bonner insisted that Kenyon drove there in a Dodge Charger. 

"I can't figure out what reason you would disassociate yourself from that vehicle, unless you're trying to keep something from me," Bonner said. "Man, this ain't going nowhere."

"Was I driving?" Kenyon asked.

"Ok, I'll slow down," Bonner said in response. "In the video, I saw you step out of the car." 

"No, I walked past to get a cigar," Kenyon responded. 

"Ok so you stepped out of the Dodge to get a cigar," Bonner shot back. 

"Umm hmm, to go to the store," Kenyon said. 

"Ok so you admit being in the car.  That's all I'm saying, dude," Bonner said. 

Discenza then stepped in, assuring Kenyon that it "ain't the crime of the century being in the car." 

"No crime being in a car," Kenyon repeated back to the officers. 

Police were already working on a theory that the dry cleaners’ assault was connected to the two murders. And so by tepidly agreeing with the officers about being at Bell's Cleaners in the Dodge Charger, Kenyon placed himself at three crime scenes. He initially told the officers he was at Bell's Cleaners alone.

"I see you get out and I see another person get out. There's another person with you," Bonner said.

"Probably my brother," Kenyon responded. 

As far as the cops were concerned, it was an important admission, as if Kenyon was confessing to the actual crimes. As Bonner later recounted in his police report:  "Kenyon stated that he and his brother had arrived at the noted location (Bell's Cleaners) on the noted time and date."

Bonner has since left the SFPD. He more recently worked as an investigator for the Alameda County District Attorney’s office and ran for City Council in Vallejo several years ago. My attempts to reach him through his campaign email and phone number and his past employers were not successful. 

The SFPD media relations team acknowledged receiving an interview request from me but did not respond to a detailed list of questions or any follow-up emails.

Bail for Kenyon and Kishawn was set at $10 million. They each faced two consecutive life sentences. Under state law, defendants in felony cases have a right to a trial within sixty days, but the Norberts gave up that right, a process known as waiving time, so that they could prepare a strong defense. 

They couldn't afford private lawyers. But Kishawn was confident in his attorney named Matt Gonzalez, the Chief Attorney in the Public Defender's office. An artist, writer and trial lawyer known for winning high-profile cases, Gonzalez previously served on the Board of Supervisors and was Ralph Nader's running mate in the 2008 presidential election.

"Matt was the bomb," Kywanna Reed, the mother of Kenyon and Kishawn, told me in an interview.  "I thought they were going to come home just off of Matt's work period."

The prosecutor was San Francisco Assistant District Attorney Heather Trevisan. In June 2015, Trevisan tried to get Gonzalez taken off the case. She filed a motion arguing that the public defender's office under Gonzalez had represented too many people in past cases who could be called as witnesses and that it could pose a conflict of interest for Kishawn and others.

By that point, Kishawn and Gonzalez had spent nearly a year working together and preparing for a potential trial. Kishawn told the judge that he didn’t want to change lawyers.

“He's the head public defender, so y'all know he has all of these cases that come through him. This is something that was known from the beginning, but it was never brought up. It was never something that was made an issue of until then,” Kenyon said.

The Norberts and their mother remain suspicious of the prosecutor's motives. "I think they was a little scared of Matt Gonzalez, of how he was pushing for our freedom," Kenyon said.

Asked to respond to Kenyon’s remarks, the San Francisco District Attorney’s office said in a statement: “California law requires courts and counsel to address potential conflicts of interest whenever they arise in order to protect a defendant’s constitutional right to conflict-free representation and to preserve the integrity of the proceedings.”

After weeks of motions and arguments about the potential conflict, the judge let Kishawn remain with Gonzalez. But the victory would be short-lived. 

By March 2016, Kenyon and Kishawn had been in San Francisco jail maintaining their innocence for one year and eight months. After extensive court delays, due to factors like the conflict of interest arguments, police witnesses being on vacation or busy in other trials and lawyers needing more time to prepare, it was finally the start of their preliminary hearing, an important step that functions as a preview for a trial, where prosecutors present their strongest evidence for the defense and judge to see. In court that day, Gonzalez mentioned that he had been sick and vomiting the night before but was determined to show up as long as he was breathing because of how long Kenyon and Kishawn had been waiting. 

The Dodge Charger and police testimony formed the crux of the prosecution’s case. Surveillance footage from Willie Cain’s murder showed the vehicle speeding through the Sunnydale Housing Projects before two people got out and fired guns at Cain. The footage isn’t clear enough to identify the suspects, but police officers and attorneys analyzed their clothing and height differences. Under questioning, Bonner said he didn’t believe that the shorter of the two shooters was either Kenyon or Kishawn. A third, unseen person alleged to be one of the brothers keeps driving the vehicle. A third person was never arrested.

Keith Zinn was shot later that morning in the Bayview, the same neighborhood where Kenyon and Kishawn were searched and arrested. The shooters fled in a Dodge Charger, but footage didn’t capture any other identifying details. Police collected bullet casings at the scene of both murders. But they never found the murder weapon on the Norberts or anywhere else. 

Police said that a cell phone found on Kishawn made calls from within the general area of the crime scenes, defined by expert witnesses as within a half mile. Defense attorneys said that the prosecutor never presented evidence about who the phone's subscriber was, implying that the calls weren't necessarily made by Kishawn.

The owner of Bell’s Cleaners who had previously failed to identify the Norberts in lineups was nevertheless called to testify as a prosecution witness.  He said he had forgotten much of what he told the police. The prosecutor, apparently frustrated, told the judge that her witness was committing “a willing refusal and claim of false memory.”

As Kenyon and Kishawn sat in court, Gonzalez asked Bell during cross-examination if they looked like the people he saw the morning of July 7.

“No,” Bell responded. “These persons that I saw that morning had short hair and they were more of a dark skinned Black person.”

And why would the Norberts want Cain and Zinn killed? There was no evidence that they had interacted before. The alleged motive came down to the testimony of a controversial gang expert. 

Leonard Broberg took an unlikely path to joining the SFPD. He was the winner of the International Mr. Leather competition in the 90s and an executive at Pacific Bell before pursuing what one publication said was a "lifelong" dream of a career in law enforcement. Before long, Broberg became known as the department's leading expert on African American gangs. He portrayed it as dangerous work, telling the San Francisco Chronicle in 2007 that he moved out of the city after running into “a bunch of my little gang-bangers" at Stonestown Mall.  

In 2015, Broberg was captured on audio labeling a group of 20 men whom the SFPD had swept up in a mass arrest in the Bayview as gang members; only two were ultimately charged with  crimes.

"It's Sunday. They should all be in church. Or getting ready for their job interviews or going to work on Monday," Broberg said. 

One year later, Broberg was a witness at the Norberts’ preliminary hearing, there to establish a motive for the killings. He testified that Kenyon and Kishawn and Zinn were rival gang members, and that the murders were revenge for a shooting that injured someone in a third gang a few days earlier. As proof, he said the shootings of Cain and Zinn occurred in the "safety zone" or territory of a rival gang.

"The thing about gangs is they protect their safety zone and they need to feel safe there," Broberg testified.

In cross-examinations, Gonzalez called Broberg’s theory "pop science” and asserted that Zinn, whom the public defender’s office previously represented, had “no gang association whatsoever.” Kenyon's court-appointed attorney Peter Furst called the motive an "abstract concept." They asked for more proof that it was a gang-related shooting.

"The fact that the shooters were listed as gang members is a factor for me to consider that it's gang related," Broberg said on the stand at one point, displaying what seemed to be circular logic. (Broberg did not return emails or attempts to reach him through the SFPD media relations team).

Gonzalez fought to exclude Broberg’s testimony. “It’s inaccurate, it's vague, it's highly biased, and it's junk science,” he told the judge. “It's got no peer review. It has no professional standards whatsoever. It's a bunch of law enforcement folks getting together to decide on their own standards whether or not somebody is in a gang.” 

Judge Harry Dorfman responded that Broberg "has previously testified 135 times as an expert on this topic."

Judge Dorfman himself is a former prosecutor with the SFDA’s homicide unit before he was appointed judge. He told Gonzalez: "The Court is aware generally in the last several years, not just in San Francisco, but across the country, of issues related to the integrity of police. But it's not relevant, in my opinion, for this preliminary hearing."

Before the preliminary hearing was over, the Norberts and their lawyers would be excluded from the courtroom altogether. 

While the Norbert brothers sat in jail, their phone calls had been monitored.

"It's looking good," Kishawn told a friend on the phone in January 2016. "My lawyer is definitely sweet so I hope they don't bring us all the way." 

Kishawn then talked about a person whom he appeared to believe had testified against him to police. "That n*** he told like basically where we're from, what we do, how we do it, and who we do it at."

"They told him off the bat you're not under arrest. You can leave at any time," Kishawn continued. "I wish I could have my lawyer, feel me."

"You gotta choose the n****s you be around," his friend said. 

They changed the subject to talk about Kishawn's plans for his daughter's birthday and people they knew who got high off of embalming fluid.

The prosecutor's office put a transcript of the call into evidence two months later because they claimed it had subtext that Kishawn planned to threaten potential witnesses in the case. Bonner testified that Kishawn was using “street jargon and coded language” to convey a threat. 

Judge Dorfman decided that there was a "possibility of a credible threat,” though not a probable one. In response, he approved the prosecution's request to hold part of the preliminary hearing in private. For two days, neither the Norberts nor their own defense lawyers were allowed to be in court.

What happened in the locked courtroom? Court transcripts that were eventually unsealed show that Trevisan discussed a confidential witness named Richard Allen. That's the same man I met in November 2025, who had told me that police pressured him to make up a story.

Allen wasn't actually there in the courtroom, and he would never testify directly in any of the Norberts' pretrial hearings. "The witness' name is Richard Allen," Trevisan said. He "is unfortunately out and unable, but has spoken with both my investigators."

Allen told me that he was never contacted by the prosecutor's office about testifying.

Since Allen was "unable" to testify, for reasons not made clear in the transcripts, prosecutors and police described to the judge what he allegedly said. Bonner said he had interviewed Allen while Allen was under arrest. "He had been detained on a legitimate legal reason, " Bonner said.  Bonner did not specify what the reason was, and no defense lawyer was there to press him on it.

Bonner described the interview with Allen as completely voluntary. "He was there of his own volition," Bonner said. "No deals were made. He was very cooperative. He was emotional because of the connection to the relative, connection to the Victim Zinn, and he was very candid."

The key testimony that Allen allegedly offered was that he had seen Kenyon and Kishawn in the Dodge Charger at roughly 11 a.m. on the morning of the murders. 

"Everything was a lie," Allen later told me. "The officers put the conversation to their benefit."

The SFPD media relations team did not respond to questions I sent them. The SFDA's office responded to me in a statement: “Questions concerning witness credibility, investigative methods, conflicting accounts, and evidentiary weight are issues that are routinely explored and tested through the adversarial court process. It would not be appropriate to relitigate those factual disputes through media commentary years after the case has been resolved.”

On April 9, 2016, the preliminary hearing concluded. Prosecutors had presented their best evidence. Judge Dorfman decided there was enough of a case to go forward and upheld the Norberts' $10 million bail.

In May 2017, Gonzalez submitted a motion accusing prosecutors of misconduct for their handling of the closed hearings and confidential witness testimony and argued that the evidence should get tossed. The prosecutor, in turn, filed a motion once again asserting that it was a conflict of interest for Gonzalez to remain Kishawn’s lawyer. The prosecutor also claimed that there were court transcripts from the case appearing on Instagram and blamed the public defender’s office for passing the documents along (court transcripts are public record and it’s perfectly legal to post them on Instagram). 

Kenyon recalled that Kishawn was faced with an impossible choice. "It was basically, you give up the lawyer and you start your whole case over again or you keep the lawyer and you won't be able to question these witnesses that could probably free you," Kenyon said. 

The case was held up for months while lawyers argued about whether Gonzalez could fairly represent Kishawn and the significance of the alleged Instagram posts. Gonzalez was also busy with another homicide trial in 2017, adding more delays, while he fought to remain Kishawn’s lawyer. But Gonzalez ultimately resigned from Kishawn’s case in November 2017, putting the conflict dispute to an end. He declined an interview request. Kishawn was assigned a private lawyer contracted by the county named Malcolm Smith, who told the judge it could take another year to be ready for trial. 

In a statement, the SFDA acknowledged that its conflict of interest motions contributed to the case stalling, but blamed the fight entirely on Gonzalez: “One of the reasons the case was delayed is because one of defense counsel denied having a conflict of interest for some time, before ultimately conceding and admitting that he did and triggering the appointment of new counsel for one of the defendants.”

Read the second half of this story next week.