Brooklyn District Attorney Eric Gonzalez on July 1 moved to vacate the 1988 first-degree manslaughter conviction of 55-year-old Brian Kendall after a the Conviction Review Unit found that the charges against him did not hold up, and that he is “likely innocent.”
According to the DA and a report drafted by the CRU, Kendall, who was 17 at the time, was in a Flatbush game room on Cortelyou Road with his younger brother and friends on Feb. 24, 1987, where they witnessed the shooting and killing of game room employee Raphael Reyes.
Kendall and his friends chased the perp down the street and flagged down a cop car for help. Some witnesses said the shooter leaped into a vehicle on Beverly Road and fled.
Even though an several eyewitnesses described the shooter as an older man who didn’t match Kendall’s description, and others reported a feud between the store owner and a local man, Kendall was arrested and charged with murder based on statements by a witness who was later discovered to have been an active drug user at the time and a 13-year-old living in a group home.
At trial, Kendall and his defense attorney, Howard Dusenberg, presented several witnesses attesting to Kendall’s innocence. But, concerned that Kendall was unlikely to win at trial — in part because evidence-sharing rules at the time restricted the defenses access to discovery in the prosecution’s case — Dusenberg advised Kendall to take a plea deal, and he did. Kendall pleaded guilty to first-degree manslaughter in exchange for a promised sentence of 8⅓ to 25 years in prison.
Kendall was paroled in 2004 after serving almost 16 years in prison and deported back to his native Guyana, which he and his family left when he was 11 years old.
“Brian Kendall’s case is a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of a system that too often fails young people of color,” said Legal Aid Society counsel David Crow, in a statement. “Despite clear evidence pointing to his innocence, Brian was forced to plead guilty under the weight of a broken process.”
In 2019, Kendall requested that the DA’s Conviction Review Unit reexamine his sentence. In 2024, the Legal Aid Society’s Wrongful Conviction Unit agreed to represent him.
The CRU investigation found that the original 911 recordings and police reports strongly corroborated Kendall and his friends’ claims, reporting that Kendall was in the street chasing the shooter, who witnesses described as a Black man in his 40s. According to the CRU report, the witness who was found to be a drug user was in jail on unrelated charges at the time, and the prosecutor had promised to write a him letter supporting his parole if he cooperated with the investigation.
When Dusenburg ran into the prosecutor after Kendall was sentenced, and the prosecutor said he was surprised the case had not gone to trial. The prosecution’s case was “weak,” he said, since two witnesses were likely unreliable or unavailable. Dusenburg said that if he had known one of the prosecution’s witnesses was in jail and that another was probably not available to testify, he probably wouldn’t have urged Kendall to take the plea deal.
In a statement, Gonzalez acknowledged that the system failed Kendall when he was pressured into pleading guilty to manslaughter charges without fully understanding the evidence against him.
“Our investigation found that eyewitnesses corroborated his long-held account of events, critical evidence was not disclosed, and because we conclude he is likely innocent, we cannot stand by this conviction. This case highlights our deep commitment to correct the mistakes of the past, and I am grateful to the Legal Aid Society for their strong advocacy during this process,” Gonzalez said.
Kendall, who appeared at Tuesday’s hearing virtually, said he wished his parents were alive to see his exoneration.
“I was just a teenager when my life was taken from me for something I didn’t do,” Kendall said. “For years, I carried the weight of a conviction that never should have happened. Today’s action doesn’t erase the pain or the time I lost, but it does give me hope. I’m deeply grateful to The Legal Aid Society and District Attorney Gonzalez for finally uncovering the truth and helping me clear my name. I only wish my mother and father were alive to see this day.”
