by Michaela Markels, Alabama Reflector
August 10, 2025

This article was originally published in Bolts, a nonprofit newsroom, as a collaboration between Bolts and the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale.

It was an idyllic Saturday afternoon on Feb. 5, 2022, as Kambran Young drove down Appalachee Street near downtown Birmingham with his two brothers and three of their best friends. Residents of the city’s Kingston neighborhood were outside, blasting loud music and washing cars as the group cruised up and down the street where they spent a lot of their time—the street where Jenkins’ and Young’s dad has his car repair business, and where their grandmother lives.

Young, 19 at the time, was the free spirit of the group, always looking for the next adrenaline rush. Justin Jenkins, one of Young’s older brothers riding with him that afternoon, remembers Young seeming restless before announcing to the car that he was thinking about stealing a wad of cash he’d spotted on a parking lot attendant’s stand a couple blocks away. Jenkins immediately tried to lure his little brother away from trouble, suggesting they go back to the nearby recording studio their father had built for them, where they had recently started making music together.

Colby Cade, another of Young’s older brothers who was also in the car that day, scolded him for even thinking of taking the money. “Sit your ass down somewhere, bro,” Jenkins remembers Cade telling the younger kids in the car. “Y’all wanna take from other people? They work hard for this stuff.”

As Cade and Jenkins left their brother with the rest of the group, Jenkins remembers asking their friend Robert, who was now driving, not to take Young back to the lot where he’d spotted the cash. “Don’t take them where they wanna go.”

Less than an hour later, Robert called Jenkins to say there had been an emergency, telling him to rush to the hospital. Young and their 17-year-old friend, Chico Guest, had been shot. “Stop playing,” Jenkins remembers saying before he felt himself begin to cry.

Young and Guest had gone to the lot to try and take the money after all, despite the pushback from Young’s brothers. While the state alleged that both Young and Guest were armed, Young and Jenkins maintain that Young was not carrying a weapon, and prosecutors never presented evidence that he did. According to Young, Guest carried a pistol, as he usually did, which he kept hidden in his sweatshirt pocket as the teenagers approached the parking lot stand. The attendant, who spotted the pair as they got close, pulled out a gun of his own and shot Guest in the chest.

Young, who ran away as fast as he could after Guest fell to the ground, was shot four times, with bullets hitting Young’s back and leg. Guest never got back up.

When Jenkins got to the hospital after an angry, anxious drive, he started to mourn the loss of Guest, who felt like a brother. Then he started to brace himself for the possibility of also losing Young, who’s been more like a twin all his life. The two were born just three months apart, to the same father and different mothers. They’ve been best friends since, and even look enough alike that people used to confuse them, with matching braids and each with tattoos of their respective moms’ names.

Jenkins prayed: Please give him one more chance, I know he’ll change. Cade tried to comfort his brother, telling him, “Kam loves you too much, he’s not going to leave you.”

Young awoke two days later inside a hospital room with around 40 staples in his stomach, and surrounded by police officers. Barely able to move, Young was handcuffed to a wheelchair and transported to the Jefferson County Jail. As he came to, Young started replaying the events of the shooting, asking himself over and over, Was there anything I could have done to save Chico?

Young says he was still in tremendous physical pain as he waited for police to question him and wanted to get home to be with family. He still hadn’t seen Jenkins.

Then the interrogation started, with police asking Young, who was still recovering from multiple gunshot wounds, to tell them everything he could remember from that Saturday.

During the interrogation, a detective asked Young whether he was aware that he was being charged with his friend’s murder. Young says he was dumbfounded and didn’t know how to respond, so the detective repeated himself: Chico Guest’s murder, you are being charged with Chico Guest’s murder.

Prosecutions for killings they didn’t commit

Felony murder is a particularly American form of punishment. The idea—that if you commit a felony, and someone dies in the process of that crime, you can be charged with murder, even if someone else committed the killing—was likely inherited from English common law. However, the U.K. abolished the doctrine in the 1950s, following public unease over the execution of a 19-year-old Londoner for the murder of a policeman, who had been shot and killed by a 16-year-old accomplice during a robbery. (Another doctrine similar to felony murder reemerged in the U.K. in the 1980s, but in 2016 the Supreme Court significantly limited its scope.)

While other Commonwealth nations like Canada eventually abolished their versions of the felony murder doctrine, the charge became even more widespread in the U.S. under mass incarceration. Today, forty-eight states permit some version of the charge.

Alabama is one of 14 states where felony murder can be applied most broadly, allowing prosecutors to charge defendants with the death of an accomplice, even when the killing was committed by someone else. Felony murder, like other murder charges in the state, is punishable by up to life in prison or even the death penalty—as illustrated by the case of Nathaniel Woods, who was executed in 2020 for the murder of three Birmingham police officers who were shot by someone else.

Law enforcement officials who prosecute people for murder under the doctrine say it aims to hold people responsible for creating dangerous situations with potentially fatal outcomes.

But critics of felony murder say the charge undermines baseline tenets of criminal law—namely, that murder requires criminal intent, or mens rea (Latin for “guilty mind”).

“Basic criminal law is that intentional murder requires mens rea and actus rea—criminal intent and criminal act. You learn that in your first semester of criminal law,” said defense attorney Mark McDaniel, who formerly served as a special assistant attorney general in Alabama. “Where is that in felony murder? It’s not there, there’s zero intent.”

The seeming disconnect of prosecuting someone for murder over a killing they didn’t actually commit often sparks public outrage and confusion around felony murder cases, including in Alabama, where McDaniel says the charge is still commonly used by prosecutors.

Darnell Coates and Lonze Byrd, for instance, were charged with the murder of William Michael Thomas, who died from a heart attack after confronting the men while they were trying to steal catalytic converters and other scrap from his recycling business in Greensboro in 2019; Thomas, 60, punctured the tires on Coates’ car to try and prevent him from fleeing and fired a warning shot before he collapsed. In 2021, law enforcement in Mobile charged Jamon Merrida and Demarcus Longmire with the murder of their friend Calvin Horne Jr., after the three went to buy marijuana and Horne was shot and killed by a third party. In 2022, Casey White was charged with murder for the death of a corrections officer who had helped him escape the Lauderdale County jail, and who subsequently took her own life following a high-speed police chase.

Another infamous case in Alabama shows how felony murder can allow police to kill someone and pin the murder charge on someone else. In 2015, LaKeith Smith, then 15 years old, and four friends broke into some unoccupied homes to steal video games and other electronics when a neighbor called the police. While Smith ran into the woods, one of his friends, 16-year-old A’Donte Washington, was shot and killed by one of the responding officers after allegedly running toward them with a weapon. Police charged the rest of the four teens with felony murder and prosecuted them as adults. Smith, who is Black and was the youngest among them, was the only one who refused to accept a plea deal and took his case to trial, where an all-white jury convicted him of murder; a judge sentenced Smith to 65 years behind bars, which an appeals court later reduced to 30 years.

There is no full accounting of how many people have been sent to prison for felony murder and for how long. In Alabama, like many states, officials do not specifically track felony murder charges but record them simply as murder—making the charge on Young’s record indistinguishable from premeditated or first-degree murder charges, with the same range of potential penalties.

In 2022, Sarah Stillman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, began working with students and colleagues at the Investigative Reporting Lab at Yale to gauge the scope and impact of the punishment. That work led to the Felony Murder Reporting Project (of which I am a part), which between early 2022 and late 2023 collected and analyzed over 10,000 cases of people charged with felony murder, to create a public data hub for exploring how the charge is applied across the country.

The Lab’s analysis revealed that felony murder is disproportionately imposed on low-income defendants, young people and people of color.

In Alabama, defendants with felony murder charges skew especially young, according to state records obtained by the Lab. Between 2009 and 2017, people charged with felony murder in Alabama were nearly nine years younger on average than those charged with other crimes.

During the same time period, 83 percent of people charged with felony murder in Alabama were Black, even though the state population is only about 27 percent Black. That means a Black Alabaman is 13 times more likely to be charged with felony murder than their white counterpart.

Records compiled by the Lab also show that, between 2009 and 2017, almost 10 percent of all murder charges in Alabama, or 281 cases, were actually for felony murder. Of those 281 people, 70 percent were convicted, meaning nearly 200 people in Alabama are likely still serving time behind bars for murders that they didn’t actually commit.

Jenkins was shocked when his brother became one of them. “I just never got it,” he said. “I never understood it.”

‘I really don’t know how to take it’

Jenkins and Young liked Chico Guest right away, after the brothers met and started hanging out with him on Appalachee Street as teenagers. Young, the more outspoken and adventurous of the brothers, got along especially well with Guest. “He had this confidence about himself,” Young told me.

Guest is one of the many people Jenkins and Young have lost to gun violence since childhood—including Guest and three of their brothers. Jenkins was in fourth grade the first time he witnessed gunfire, when he saw his brother’s friend die in a drive-by shooting. “I was traumatized,” he said of the memory.

Jenkins told me that, in the northeast Birmingham neighborhood where he and Young grew up, people start carrying guns in their early teens as a matter of survival. Jefferson County, where Birmingham is located, has seen a record number of homicides in the past several years, though killings have recently started to fall below pre-pandemic levels (as they have in much the rest of the country).

Jenkins says Young was aware that Guest was carrying a pistol the day of the robbery, but didn’t register it as a serious threat or consider the possibility that it might actually be used, because guns were so routinely present. Looking back at Young and Guest now, over 3 years later, he sees their mindset at the time of the robbery as impulsive, shortsighted and careless—but not as violent.

A growing body of research in criminal psychology is beginning to take this characteristic of the adolescent mind into account when assessing the culpability and sentencing of young people. Research shows that the prefrontal cortex of the brain, critical for impulse control and decision making, continues to develop well into the mid-20s.

Over the past two decades, the U.S. Supreme Court has abolished the death penalty for those under 18, banned life without parole sentences for non-homicidal juvenile crimes, and deemed it unconstitutional to automatically sentence juveniles convicted of homicide to life without parole. In recent years, a wave of states, including Massachusetts and Michigan, have also restricted life sentences for young adults up until age 21, blurring the bright line distinction for adulthood that the criminal legal system has traditionally set at age 18.

Some other states, like Pennsylvania, have also started to assess whether extreme sentences for felony murder, like life without parole, violate state and federal constitutional protections. In a high-profile case now before the Pennsylvania Supreme Court, critics argue these harsh sentences are disproportionate and fail to account for individual culpability, especially for young or minimally involved defendants.

As the law stands today in Alabama, prosecutors aren’t required to consider a defendant’s age, unless they’re under 14, or degree of direct involvement in a killing when deciding whether to charge them with murder.

Young spent over one year waiting to be indicted, and more than two years overall waiting for trial. At the start, he was bailed out by his dad and placed on house arrest, where he and Jenkins had time to process Guest’s death and Young’s criminal case together.

Jenkins visited Young at home nearly every day during the year he spent on house arrest. “We were talking about life, thinking about the things we wish we never did, wishing life had a rewind button,” Jenkins said.

Sometimes the brothers would visit friends or go to the studio when Young’s probation officer allowed it. “We rap about what’s going on and what we’ve been through,” Jenkins said. “We make pain music.”

They call one song that they wrote together their “Letter to Chico,” which currently has more than 130,000 views on YouTube:

“I remember the day my brother died, yeah I swear I cried. 

Holding all this shit inside, I swear it left me traumatized. 

Baby boy I miss you, Imma ride until I blow the tires.”

Young’s bail was revoked in 2023 when he missed a court date, which he says he didn’t know about because he hadn’t been notified of the hearing. He found out he had to go back to jail after his dad was told that Young had 21 days to turn himself in, or else his dad would lose his house, which had been posted as collateral to cover his bail. Young cried nearly every one of those 21 days, and turned himself in on the last morning he could.

Jenkins’s daughter was born just days after Young went back to jail. “I was trying to keep him out so he could see my baby,” Jenkins told me.

In the spring of 2024, Young’s attorney informed him that he’d negotiated a deal with prosecutors to drop the felony murder charge in exchange for him pleading guilty to manslaughter, a Class B felony punishable by up to 20 years in prison.

Young recoiled at the idea of pleading guilty to something he didn’t do, but worried that taking the case to trial would nevertheless result in him being convicted for murdering his friend.

On April 8, 2024, Young pleaded guilty to the manslaughter of Chico Guest, one of his closest friends, and was later sentenced to up to 15 years in prison, with the possibility of parole in 2028.

As we talked about the felony murder charge, and how it ultimately persuaded him to enter a guilty plea for a lesser charge, Young still seemed to be processing the sequence of events that led to his prison sentence. “I really don’t know how to take it, or explain how I feel,” Young told me.

Seeking law changes

Last year, as Young started serving his prison sentence inside Kilby Correctional Facility, advocates 15 miles away in Montgomery were lobbying for legislative changes to prevent felony murder charges in cases like his. House Bill 32, filed during the Alabama Legislature’s 2024 session by Chris England, a Democratic state representative from Tuscaloosa, would have narrowed the state’s felony murder law to exclude cases where the killing was committed by a third party—like when a cop or a store clerk kills someone’s accomplice during a robbery.

When discussing the legislation at an Alabama House committee hearing last year, England said, “What we’re trying to do is something where we don’t ensnare someone that shouldn’t be serving the range of punishment of a class A felony because of some unfortunate incident that occurs that they were not involved with, and that they didn’t intend to happen.”

Among the advocates who spoke in support of the bill at the committee hearing was Andre Washington, the father of A’Donte Washington, who was shot and killed by a police officer while committing a burglary, leading to the felony murder convictions of four of his friends, including LaKeith Smith, who remains in prison.

“This is the first in-person public statement I’ve ever made, and I’m doing this in support of HB 32,” Washington told lawmakers during the hearing. “My son lost his life, and now I’m having to sit and watch another son’s life be thrown away.” Brontina Smith, LaKeith’s mother, also testified at the hearing in support of the bill.

HB 32, however, stalled in the committee without a vote after three district attorneys spoke in opposition, including CJ Robinson, who prosecuted LaKeith Smith.

Months after he testified against HB 32, Robinson told me in a phone interview in late August 2024 that, despite his opposition to the reform bill, he was open to proposals for narrowing the application of felony murder. He explained that he disagreed with the bill’s suggested elimination of proximate cause—the idea that someone can be enough of an indirect cause for someone’s death to be treated as though they themselves directly committed the murder—saying a defendant in Smith’s position had “created that situation that ended up with a friend dying.”

But Robinson did seem to be reconsidering the fairness of the charge he prosecuted against Smith and his friends. “Old fashioned intentional murder shouldn’t carry the exact same range of punishment and class of felony as what Lakeith Smith did,” Robinson told me. “I don’t know if I would have this opinion if I hadn’t lived that case.”

Alabama lawmakers this year didn’t file any proposed legislation to reform how felony murder is prosecuted.

Young, who has spent the last year trying to adapt to his new life in prison, says he feels lucky to have a family who supports him; Jenkins and his mother still call him every day.

But incarceration doesn’t insulate him from the trauma that gun violence continues to inflict on his community back home. Last February, while he was still awaiting trial at the Jefferson County jail, he called his mom soon after seeing news of a murder near his neighborhood pop up on TV, only to have her confirm his worst fears: Colby Cade, one of his brothers, had been shot and killed.

Young, who had spoken to Cade earlier that day, remembers being speechless, how he could barely breathe and just cried. He spent the next eight days in his cell and was placed on suicide watch.

“We felt so bad for him that he wasn’t with us,” Jenkins told me. Young wasn’t able to grieve alongside his family.

Still, Jenkins lights up when he’s thinking about the future with Young. He says they dream of one day moving to New York together and making music.

When Jenkins looks back on that fateful day in February 2022, what strikes him is that every other guy in that car with him cruising down Appalachee Street is now either dead or incarcerated. “I’m the only one here,” he said.

Jenkins is beginning to release music again—a practice he had stopped since Young’s arrest, Cade’s death, and the birth of his daughter. Although he can see how difficult this period has been for his brother, Jenkins says he also feels proud of Young.

“He’s changed, he’s growing up,” Jenkins said. “He wants to do the right thing, and his conversations, the way he talks, he’s just totally different.”

Alabama Reflector is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alabama Reflector maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Brian Lyman for questions: info@alabamareflector.com.

The post A friend’s death to mourn, and to serve time for appeared first on alabamareflector.com

Note: The following A.I. based commentary is not part of the original article, reproduced above, but is offered in the hopes that it will promote greater media literacy and critical thinking, by making any potential bias more visible to the reader –Staff Editor.

Political Bias Rating: Center-Left

This content critically examines Alabama’s felony murder law with a focus on its broad application, disproportionate impact on marginalized communities, and the personal toll it takes on defendants and their families. It highlights systemic issues such as racial disparities and the challenges faced by young defendants while featuring calls for legislative reform. The tone is empathetic towards those affected by the law and skeptical of prosecutorial practices, reflecting a perspective commonly associated with center-left viewpoints that emphasize criminal justice reform and social equity without overtly radical language or partisan rhetoric.