Parolee is linked to another city death

Keith Lollis, who served time for a 1986 double murder, faces a similar charge in a Christmas Eve slaying

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 in 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