A man who spent 16 years behind bars after police wrongly arrested him for a Brooklyn pool hall murder — even though he was the one who flagged down a cop car after the shooting — is slated to be exonerated Tuesday.
Brian Kendall was 17 and in the wrong place at the wrong time on Feb. 24, 1988 — hanging out with his younger brother and several pals in a game room in Flatbush, around the corner from his home — when a killer shot Raphael Reyes, a worker there, to death.
“I was just a teenager when my life was taken from me for something I didn’t do. 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,” Kendall, 55, said in a statement Tuesday.
“I’m deeply grateful to The Legal Aid Society and District Attorney (Eric) 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.”
Kendall and his friends chased the shooter down the street and flagged down a police car but the killer escaped.
Call logs from police emergency transmissions backed that account up, and a witness at the scene described the shooter as a short, middle-aged man wearing an overcoat, according to a report released Tuesday by the Brooklyn D.A.’s office. And the dead man’s brother and nephew told cops that Reyes chased off a man dealing drugs in the pool hall.
But the investigation soon focused, wrongly, on Kendall, after a man with substance abuse problems showed up at an NYPD stationhouse and described how two teens, whose names he didn’t know, were arguing with the victim, then said the older of the two teens killed him.
A 13-year-old boy living in a group home then told cops he was there as well, playing a video game at the Cortleyou Road game room, and said the killer was someone named “Brian.”
So cops found a picture of Kendall and showed it to the stationhouse witness, who fingered him as the killer.
Kendall’s defense lawyer found several witnesses who said Kendall was either with them at the time of the shooting or on the street shortly after. But the lawyer didn’t have access to key details of the prosecution’s case and so told the teen he’d likely lose at trial.
Kendall made the hard call to plead guilty to manslaughter for 8 1/2 to 25 years in prison. He served 16, then was deported to Guyana, where he had grown up before leaving at age 11.
“Our system failed Brian Kendall when he was encouraged to plead guilty to a horrific crime without a full understanding of the evidence against him,” Gonzalez said Tuesday. “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.”
His case is the 41st exoneration to come about after an investigation by the D.A.’s Conviction Review Unit.
Their investigation revealed that the original 911 recordings backed up Kendall’s initial claims, and found that a police officer saw him on the street after the shooting, further backing up his version of what happened.
The victim’s nephew told the unit’s investigators, “I think you got the wrong guy.”
“Brian Kendall’s case is a stark reminder of the devastating consequences of a system that too often fails young people of color,” David Crow of the Legal Aid Society said Tuesday. “Despite clear evidence pointing to his innocence, Brian was forced to plead guilty under the weight of a broken process.”
The D.A.’s office and Legal Aid are expected to file a joint motion to vacate Kendall’s conviction in Brooklyn Supreme Court Tuesday morning.
Kendall, who now lives in Guyana, is expected to appear remotely.
