What became of the young man S.F. socialites freed from prison
A congratulatory plaque hangs in the den of Bob and Connie Lurie’s Atherton home: “For courageous action to correct an injustice and defend a citizen accused.”
Bob Lurie still owned the San Francisco Giants in 1989 when the California Attorneys for Criminal Justice honored his wife and a curious collection of Bay Area luminaries who fought for and freed a man from prison. The honorees included William Newsom, a state Appeals Court judge and the father of Lt. Gov. Gavin Newsom; Al Wilsey, husband of arts patron Dede Wilsey; and Con Murphy, a retired San Francisco police chief.
What drew them together was compassion for a 23-year-old inmate serving a 15-year sentence in Lompoc federal prison for keeping what they understood to be an antique pistol in his bedroom. The young man’s story: A spurned girlfriend had taken her vengeance on him by telling
police about a gun he’d kept for years as decoration. It was his life-changing misfortune that possessing it violated terms of his parole for a previous crime.
“I cried,” said Connie Lurie, recalling the day in 1987 that she first read about Kevin Sherbondy in The Chronicle.
Sherbondy was movie-star gorgeous. At 6 feet 3, with dark hair and a jaunty smile, he seemed better suited for a toothpaste ad than a mug shot. He was also the first person in the country to be convicted under a federal law requiring a sentence of at least 15 years without parole for “career criminals” caught with a gun. He’d been arrested Nov. 17, 1986, just after making the dean’s list at Saddleback College in Orange County.
Hoping to overturn the sentence, Lurie and the others formed the Sherbondy Action Association. These A-listers of San Francisco society donated money, hired a lawyer and wrote to politicians and the press to free the young stranger. The roster of contributors ballooned to about 70 people. Astonishingly, they won.
Three decades later, The Chronicle set out to learn what Sherbondy had done with his freedom. The same Chronicle reporter who interviewed him at Lompoc prison in 1989 conducted interviews, reviewed news coverage from that period and examined court records.
The truth is chilling. His story is one of deception, terror, broken promises and suspicion of murder.
A bank robber named Dannie Martin introduced Sherbondy to the public in 1987. An inmate at Lompoc federal prison, Martin wrote a series of articles for The Chronicle about life inside prison walls.
Martin’s article about the young inmate didn’t hide the facts that at 23, Sherbondy had already committed three felonies, served 3½ years in state prison and used cocaine. But those were youthful mistakes that didn’t make Sherbondy a “career criminal,” Martin wrote. He said the college student had long since quit hanging out with friends who led wild lives.
Readers sent hundreds of letters to the newspaper, outraged that a young man could be imprisoned for so long because of an old gun and a vindictive girlfriend.
They wrote to President Ronald Reagan, California Gov. George Deukmejian, members of Congress and “60 Minutes.” Bill O’Reilly and David Frost filmed “The Story of a College Kid Locked Up for 15 Years” for TV’s “Inside Edition.” Sherbondy himself received a dozen letters a day.
Ed LeClair, a software company vice president, was so moved by Sherbondy’s story that he visited the inmate at Lompoc. He teamed up with Connie Lurie to create the Sherbondy Action Association.
Murphy, San Francisco’s former top cop, also signed up. “That kid got a bum deal,” he told The Chronicle at the time.
Al Wilsey, a land developer and socialite who called himself “very conservative” on crime, also joined, saying, “The punishment did not fit the crime.”
Another member, Judge Newsom, donated $1,000. Sven Simonsen, co-founder of Advanced Micro Devices, gave $2,500.
With the money they raised, the group hired Dennis Riordan, a dogged attorney who would become one of the Bay Area’s top appellate lawyers.
Riordan called Sherbondy “an ass” for being anywhere near a gun with his record. But he also declared the 15year sentence a “terrible injustice.”
To nearly everyone’s amazement, Riordan persuaded a judge to replace the mandatory term with five years’ probation. On March 30, 1989, after 2½ years, the “career criminal” walked free.
The federal prosecutor who had won the conviction, Robert Bonner, said the San Franciscans had been played.
“I’m convinced he’s a shrewd manipulator,” Bonner told “Inside Edition.” “He’s misled good people into believing his sob story.”
Sherbondy assured his supporters they wouldn’t be sorry.
“I’m going to get my life back together and be happy,” he told The Chronicle. “I have to show them that their efforts have been worthwhile. I’ll never be back in prison again.”
Kevin Sherbondy was born on May 29, 1963, to Patricia Sherbondy, 21, and her boyfriend, Douglas Lynch, who didn’t stay to watch him grow up.
Patricia didn’t see him grow up, either — she died of a drug overdose when Kevin was 10, two years after she lost custody of him to her parents, Ethel and Arthur Sherbondy.
Ethel, a dental hygienist, and Arthur, a retired bank vice president, raised him in a home overlooking the Pacific Ocean in San Clemente in Orange County. They were Mom and Dad to Kevin, who joined Little League and learned to swim, surf and skateboard.
But all was not idyllic. Kevin and his older brother Dan, who had lived with his grandparents since infancy, pummeled each other constantly. Kevin remembered being pushed down the stairs. Dan remembered breaking his toe while kicking his brother. At 12, Kevin was arrested and handcuffed for skateboarding in a drainage canal, Martin wrote in his article about Sherbondy.
After he’d learned to drive, Kevin took Ethel’s new car without permission and totaled it. She returned the favor by smashing his skateboard with an ax.
Arthur urged his grandson to get a degree and a solid job. So in 1980, at 17, Sherbondy enrolled at Saddleback College to study acting and business. Soon he had a business of his own: selling cocaine.
At 18, he was arrested twice — for possessing half an ounce of cocaine and, while out on bail, for threatening a customer with a BB gun. He got nine months in county jail.
Soon after that jail stint in 1982, Sherbondy met Monique Juzaitis, a 21-year-old motel clerk in San Clemente. He drove her home from a friend’s house and called her a few times.
She ignored him, though it pained her to do so. The man was gorgeous. But he seemed shady.
Her instincts were right. Shortly after he met Juzaitis, Sherbondy and a friend donned ski masks and accosted two men they said had stolen their cocaine. Sherbondy aimed a loaded revolver at one man’s head and cocked the trigger. The men gave up the drugs.
Police arrested Sherbondy soon afterward. He wound up at Norco state prison in Riverside County, an hour north of his grandparents’ home.
Juzaitis went on with her life but kept in touch with the man who had intrigued her.
Over the next two years, Sherbondy was transferred to prisons at San Quentin, Soledad and Chino before winning parole on July 7, 1985. But he quickly landed back behind bars, this time for warning someone not to testify against a friend of his — felony intimidation of a witness.
The San Francisco socialites who were moved by Dannie Martin’s story about the young convict knew only the sympathetic version of his life as told by Sherbondy himself and written up by Martin. Here’s how it went:
After being paroled again in August 1986, Sherbondy returned to Saddleback College — and though he had previously taken few classes, and had twice enrolled without taking any, he landed on the dean’s list that fall. Sherbondy also moved into a golf-course condominium owned by his grandfather. A new girlfriend moved in with him.
Martin didn’t identify the girlfriend in his piece, but he blamed her for betraying Sherbondy. He portrayed her as a bad influence who was intent on getting back at Sherbondy for insisting that she move out
of the home they shared.
“His girl still liked to party,” Martin wrote. “But Sherbondy, as a full-time college student with two jobs, had no time for nights on the town.”
In Martin’s account, when Sherbondy told her to leave, the woman contacted the Orange County Sheriff ’s Department and reported that Sherbondy kept a gun at home, a violation of his parole.
Five days later — on the day the new law increased the mandatory sentence from two to 15 years — deputies, federal agents and a parole office raided Sherbondy’s bedroom. There they found a holstered Ruger .44 long-barrel revolver hanging from his bedpost.
In his story, Martin made it sound like something Wyatt Earp might have carried, calling it a “20- to 30-year-old gun with Western, ‘frontier’ styling.” But that wasn’t how the law saw it.
“It’s a replica of an old Western revolver, but it’s not an antique,” Orange County sheriff ’s Sgt. Otis Weichum said at the time. “It fires. It shoots. Bullets come out the end.”
The gun jammed in its first test fire. It worked in the second.
Sherbondy told Martin he had bought the gun at a garage
sale when he was 16.
“I’d had that old gun so long it was like an old tennis shoe,” he said. “I never dreamed I could get 15 years for owning it.”
His grandparents were stunned when they heard the sentence. Sherbondy told Martin, “We all thought I finally had it made.”
His chance at redemption came three years later, when Connie Lurie and her friends won their crusade to clear his name.
The morning after Sherbondy left prison in 1989, he celebrated with bacon and eggs at his grandparents’ table in San Clemente. He also accepted an offer to work at his brother’s dance club in Northern California.
But he felt nervous about a party Connie Lurie was planning in San Francisco for him to meet the Sherbondy Action Association.
“They’ll probably stick me up on a table and put an apple in my mouth,” he told The Chronicle at the time.
San Francisco society did appear to enjoy Sherbondy. He joined the Luries in their luxury suite for Giants games at Candlestick Park. In smiling photos, he towered above the
prominent people who helped him. He befriended the Lurie children and attended their birthday parties.
“He became one of the family,” Connie Lurie recalled. “He was really a nice kid.”
Eventually, however, Sherbondy decided his place was not in San Francisco, and he didn’t want the job at his brother’s club. He preferred San Clemente.
For one thing, Juzaitis was there. The woman who had found him tempting — but shady — had stayed in contact with Sherbondy throughout his ordeal. Pleased that so many people had banded together to free him, she agreed to date him.
But her concerns soon resurfaced.
He never returned to Saddleback College. And he never looked for work. Juzaitis thought Sherbondy was making money with a credit card scheme, but she wasn’t sure. She knew only that he didn’t have a job, while she worked two.
More than a year went by like that until March 1991, when everything changed.
Juzaitis was pregnant.
Many prospective fathers use such news as an opportunity to plan for the future and shed old habits. Instead, within days, Sherbondy stole a car, crossed the border and crashed the vehicle in Baja California.
“They had to life-flight him to Scripps Hospital in San Diego,” Juzaitis said. “I’ll never forget seeing his grandma going to Scripps. It was very sad. Very sad.”
Sherbondy arrived with a head injury and five blood clots. He developed meningitis — an inflammation of membranes around the brain — and lapsed into a 10-day coma. The injuries would lead to years of seizures and other health problems.
As he recovered, though, Sherbondy seemed calmer and, for the first time, excited about the pregnancy. On May 29, 1991, Sherbondy’s 28th birthday, Juzaitis let him move in with her for the first time. In October she gave birth to fraternal twin girls, Chanel and Cheyenne.
Juzaitis hoped that being a father would transform Sherbondy into the kind of man his San Francisco cheering section believed he was. It didn’t. “He was hanging out with the wrong people,” she said. “He started smoking weed. He was doing meth or coke, I’m not sure. And he would drink.”
Juzaitis insisted he quit drugs. He ignored her.
His temper “could flare up at any time,” Juzaitis said. “Once he had me in the kitchen, a knife to my neck.”
The end came one day as she was feeding the girls and Sherbondy entered the kitchen.
“He pushed one of the high chairs because he was hungry and thought needed to be fed,” she said. “I tried to get him out. I put a chair to hold the door, but he kicked it in and it hit the crib.”
She ordered him to move out.
Sherbondy returned to his grandparents, who lived a mile and a half away. But he often sought out Juzaitis, threatening to snatch their daughters and take them to Mexico.
Juzaitis obtained a temporary restraining order in 1993 that gave Sherbondy supervised visits with the twins at his grandparents’ house. When he continued to pick fights, she went back to court.
“Daddy’s in handcuffs,” one of the girls said on the day police led Sherbondy away.
He got seven months in jail for violating the restraining order.
“One time he wrote a postcard to the girls and said, ‘Your mom is a real witch’ — or something that rhymes with that — ‘and she’s the reason why I’m here,’ ” Juzaitis said.
When Juzaitis asked the judge to make the restraining order permanent, Sherbondy
dared him to do it. The judge did, and barred Sherbondy from further contact with his daughters.
But Sherbondy defied that order, too. He had lost the muscular build that had made him a heartthrob. Now, at about 300 pounds, he was so big “he could fill a doorway,” Juzaitis said.
He showed up at the restaurant where she worked and scribbled graffiti about her in the men’s room. He phoned her repeatedly and called her a whore. He drove or cycled past her house.
“I should have killed you when I had the chance!” she once heard him yell as he rode by.
There were more death threats. On Feb. 12, 1994, Sherbondy wrote Juzaitis a letter saying his friends would “track her down” and kill her if she “touched” the children.
Two weeks later, he wrote another letter saying he had once arranged for an ex-girlfriend to be killed. “You will wish you were (her),” he wrote. “She had it quick and easy.”
Juzaitis knew the story of the former girlfriend whom Sherbondy had blamed for the arrest that led to his 15-year sentence. She wondered if his letter referred to her.
She didn’t believe the tale of revenge he’d told Dannie Martin when they were inmates in 1987, because she’d heard a different version from Sherbondy and his grandparents.
Sherbondy had told Juzaitis that he had kicked his girlfriend out because he was angry that she wouldn’t stop screaming about something.
“He said he was simply trying to get her to shut up,” Juzaitis recalled.
How he did that, Sherbondy never revealed. But Juzaitis said that Art and Ethel Sherbondy told her that when the girlfriend showed up at their house that night, “she had a red mark on her face.”
“She was very upset, and she ended up calling his probation officer,” Juzaitis said. “His excuse about the antique gun is a bunch of crap. He always had guns.”
As for Sherbondy’s girlfriend, “I think she was afraid of him.”
So was Juzaitis.
Did Sherbondy arrange for a girlfriend to be killed, as he claimed?
The Chronicle’s efforts to locate the woman who tipped off police about his gun were unsuccessful, but Sherbondy was never arrested for murder. The only public record that addresses the killing he spoke of is a brief footnote in a court document that indicates the matter was investigated and dismissed.
In reference to Sherbondy’s repeated boasts to Juzaitis about the murder, it simply says: “This statement is not true.”
But Juzaitis believed it was true then, so she returned to court.
In July 1996, Sherbondy was arrested for felony stalking while under a restraining order.
His lawyer argued that he was incompetent to stand trial because the car crash five years earlier had left him with seizures, memory loss and poor concentration. Two psychiatrists diagnosed Sherbondy as impulsive and said he might react explosively under stress — but both found him competent to stand trial.
In 1997, eight years after well-meaning San Franciscans helped Sherbondy escape a 15-year sentence, an Orange County jury deliberated less than two hours before convicting him of two counts of stalking and one count of violating a restraining order.
He got 25 years to life. This time, there were no writers, celebrities or socialites to object.
Art and Ethel Sherbondy continued to visit their grandson in the state prison in Vacaville until shortly before their deaths in 2011.
Most members of the Sherbondy Action Association lost touch with Sherbondy long
before his latest conviction, and never learned that he was again behind bars.
Only LeClair, the software executive who co-founded the Sherbondy Action Association, knew. He traded letters with Sherbondy for years. Yet Sherbondy’s true story eluded him, too.
“He was a victim of the ‘three strikes’ law,” LeClair, 81, said when contacted recently. “He got life in prison for pouring paint on a car.”
On hearing the facts of Sherbondy’s life, LeClair grew tearful. “It’s never very nice to have your illusions shattered,” he said.
In 2011, more than 20 years after helping Sherbondy walk free, LeClair visited him in prison. He was stunned at what he saw.
“It wasn’t Kevin Sherbondy,” he said. “They brought out this little man in a wheelchair who stared at me.”
In 2012, Juzaitis received a letter on prison stationery from the California Medical Facility at Vacaville. It said Kevin Sherbondy had died of a heart attack on April 18. He was 48.
“There was a time when I really cared for him, and I loved him,” she said through tears.
Others, too, had cared for Sherbondy.
“He died in prison?” Connie Lurie said, a look of shock crossing her face. “Oh, my word! What a heartbreak.”
After hearing the facts of Sherbondy’s life since she and others had rallied to his aid, Lurie pulled out a photo album of him with his benefactors in 1989.
“We gave him an opportunity,” she said, studying the images of the tall, handsome young man surrounded by people who believed in him. “I feel sad that he didn’t take the opportunity and lead a happy, successful life. But you do the best you can. You give people chances to make their lives better. That’s all any of us can do.”
Dannie Martin, the storytelling bank robber whose article inspired Lurie and the others to help Sherbondy, died a free man in 2013.
Socialite Al Wilsey and former Police Chief Con Murphy of the Sherbondy Action Association have also died. Retired Judge Newsom did not respond to a request for comment.
Robert Bonner, the former prosecutor who warned the public not to be fooled by a beautiful face and a story too good to be true, was not surprised to learn Sherbondy’s fate.
“My hope was that I was wrong,” Bonner said. “I am actually sorry that I turned out to be right. Such a waste.”
Was it a waste? Did the San Franciscans who took a chance on Sherbondy — and were thoroughly wrong about him — make a mistake?
“I think the reason Kevin and I were brought together was to have these beautiful girls,” Juzaitis said.
Today, Chanel, a bartender, and Cheyenne, a restaurant server, live near their mother in San Clemente. Cheyenne, who also studies sociology in nearby Irvine, avoids discussing her father. Chanel does not.
“I wish I would have known him better,” she said. “I think Cheyenne and I did pretty well without having a dad. If I ever have a kid, I know I’m going to have one with someone who’s going to be there. I’ve seen my mom having to do everything by herself.”
Chanel said she and her sister never knew that a group of people once rallied to help their father.
And that if it hadn’t happened, they would not have been born.
“It’s pretty cool that he got so many people involved,” Chanel said. “It’s awesome that people did that for him.”
“I’d had that old gun so long it was like an old tennis shoe. I never dreamed I could get 15 years for owning it.” Kevin Sherbondy, in a 1987 Chronicle story