OAKLAND — When prosecutors charged Keith Dawayne Lollis with killing an acquaintance last Christmas Eve, it was the second time the 53-year-old has been accused of murder his native city.
In 1988, Lollis, who is also known as Keith Gains, pleaded guilty to first-degree murder for driving two gang members to the 8200 block of Holly Street in Oakland, where one of them opened fire with a machine gun, killing Norman Stovall and Burler Moore. After fingerprints on the vehicle led to Lollis’ arrest, he told police the murders had been ordered by a neighborhood gang leader named James “Canon” Harris, but he assumed the “mission” they were on was to hurt or intimidate, not to kill, court records show.
That admission came back to help Lollis in 2019. After being denied parole multiple times, Lollis was freed under SB 1437, a law took effect that year restricting the scope of California’s felony murder rule. Lollis was freed from prison and didn’t return, despite a 2020 incident where he allegedly brandished a pen at a California Highway Patrol officer and threatened to stab him.
But now, Lollis is back in Santa Rita Jail in Dublin, and this time he’s accused of being the trigger man. Oakland police claim they’ve used surveillance footage and witness statements to identify Lollis as a suspect in the Christmas Eve 2023 slaying of Marlon Jones. The 50-year-old was shot and killed in front of his wife while returning from the grocery store.
The motive for Jones’ slaying remains under investigation, but police say the two men knew one another.
The story behind the Oct. 1, 1986 killings of Stovall and Moore was not so mysterious: police said at the time that Harris — who died in 1988 — was engaged in a violent feud with a rival drug dealer and sent two hitmen to target the dealer’s friends. Lollis later expressed regret to authorities that he’d been “manipulated” into driving the gunmen, and added that he felt they would have killed him if they knew he’d failed to set the vehicle on fire, per Harris’ instructions, according to court records.
“That’s why I pled guilty without a fight, seeing all the hurt I caused the family in the courtroom hit me, making me want to hide in shame,” Lollis told a parole board in 2008, adding that he wrote apology letters to the victims’ families but was too ashamed to send them.
“It’s a struggle because every life is worth something, I believe, and at the time I wasn’t mature enough to really understand that,” Lollis said. “It still hurts to this day, to tell you the truth. It’s just hard to really talk about.”
Court records and the hearing transcript detail Lollis’ life up to that point. He was raised in East Oakland, the youngest of 13 siblings, and didn’t meet his father until he was 14. He dropped out of high school but found work at a local bakery. He was charged with the double murder at age 20, and quickly confessed, naming Antonio “Tony White” Harris as the lone shooter. Police identified William Amos as the second gunman in the car.
While in prison, Lollis maintained a relationship with a Castro Valley woman and found several employment options in anticipation of being released. He told the parole board in 2008 he’d worked in prison cutting meat and wished to be a butcher in the East Bay.
Parole commissioners in the 2008 hearing at California State Prison, Solano noted that Lollis presented a “low risk” of committing violence again. But they denied parole and encouraged him to take more self-help classes and the like. He continued to receive denials all the way until 2019, when Alameda County Judge Morris Jacobson granted a petition to overturn his conviction under SB 1437.
The law prevents prosecutors from filing murder charges against someone who committed a felony where a cohort killed someone, unless the defendant acted as a “major participant” with reckless indifference to human life, or if other similar legal technicalities are met. Because prosecutors’ theory of the case relied on Lollis’ own statement — that Harris ordered him to go on an unspecified “mission” — he qualified for relief. His petition was filed just two weeks after the law went into effect.
Before Lollis was released from jail in July 2019, Jacobson imposed a three-year parole term and explained his reasoning.
“You’re about to go cold turkey from where you are in a very structured environment into our community where you may or may not have sufficient resources, and I hope that there would be some assistance from the parole authority in terms of transitioning you back into Oakland society,” he told Lollis.
Lollis was released in July 2019 and stayed out of trouble until the following year. In April 2020, he allegedly crashed a car into a concrete wall on westbound Interstate 580, near the Park Boulevard exit. Lollis and two female passengers were injured, and admitted to drinking two 12-ounce Budweisers before taking the wheel, according to prosecutors.
At the hospital, a CHP officer asked nurses to take a blood sample for testing. After the sample was taken, Lollis allegedly became irate and pulled out his medical equipment.
“I am not going back to jail. I did 30 years in prison for killing motherf—–s. I am not going back to jail for some DUI bulls—,” Lollis allegedly said. Police say he then brandished a pen, threatened the officer and fled the hospital. He was arrested nine days later at his girlfriend’s home in Berkeley.
After that incident, Lollis was charged with a parole violation, and sentenced to one day in jail, court records show. He was also charged with two misdemeanors for allegedly falling asleep drunk behind the wheel in Oakland, two months after his April arrest.