California man sentenced to 50 years to life for shooting ex during 911 call

On a February morning in 2024, a woman in Pinole, California, made a call that would be her last. Brittany Ligdis, thirty years old, had locked herself and her four-year-old son in a laundry room after her ex-partner broke into her home. She was on the phone with 911 when Jeffery Kendall found them. Ninety seconds into that call—ninety seconds—he shot her in the head. Her son heard it. He cried out for his mother and ran from the room. Kendall fled. When police arrived, Ligdis was dead.

More than two years later, on a Monday in August 2026, Kendall learned his sentence: fifty years to life in prison. A jury had convicted him in May of first-degree murder and child endangerment. The conviction reflected what prosecutors saw as the calculated nature of the act—not a crime of passion, not a moment of lost control, but what Deputy District Attorney Tylyn Wells called "an execution in front of a 4-year-old child."

The timeline matters. Kendall and Ligdis had ended their relationship just ten days before he broke into her home. This detail sits at the center of what prosecutors argued was a pattern familiar to anyone who works in domestic violence: the moment a victim leaves is often the most dangerous. Wells pressed the court to see the killing not as an isolated tragedy but as the violent culmination of a relationship marked by escalating danger. The judge agreed. Superior Court Judge Glenn Kim, who called the case "one of the most difficult" he had encountered in his tenure, imposed two consecutive sentences of twenty-five years to life, effectively ensuring Kendall would spend the rest of his natural life in prison.

Kendall had also been convicted of illegally possessing a 3D-printed semi-automatic pistol—a weapon manufactured outside traditional channels, which the judge determined warranted additional consideration in sentencing. The court imposed restrictions on Kendall's ability to contact his son, with limited exceptions requiring court approval, until November 2035, when the boy turns sixteen. By then, the child will have spent most of his conscious life without his mother and with his father behind bars.

A year after Ligdis's death, her mother released a video message. She spoke about wanting people to remember her daughter not for the violence that took her, but for who she was—the person she had been before that morning. "I want this to be a day to remember Brittany, to memorialize her, the amazing person she was," she said. "Think of her—all the things we miss about her, her kiss, her hug. I'll miss everything myself. I will love her forever." The words carried the weight of a mother trying to hold onto something other than grief, trying to insist that Brittany Ligdis was more than the circumstances of her death.

Kendall remains in county jail awaiting transfer to the California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation. He will serve his sentence in the state system. The case stands as a stark illustration of the particular vulnerability that follows the decision to leave—the moment when leaving itself becomes an act of courage, and when the danger, for some, becomes absolute.