Man Gets 16 Years for Killing ‘the Brother I Never Had’

A Granada Hills teen-ager with a history of drug and alcohol abuse was sentenced Monday to 16 years to life in state prison for killing his best friend, “the brother I never had,” who was urging him to kick his drug habit.

Shannon Ray Hall, 18, will be allowed to serve his sentence at a California Youth Authority facility until he is 25, however, so he can be placed in educational and rehabilitation programs there, a San Fernando Superior Court judge ruled.

Hall was convicted of second-degree murder in May for the March 9, 1988, stabbing death of Dennis Jobe, 19. The two teen-agers’ families were connected by marriage. They had been friends since they were small children and lived on the same block for many years.

On the night of the murder, Hall was drunk. Jobe, who had successfully completed a cocaine rehabilitation program seven months earlier, criticized Hall for his continued drug and alcohol abuse. The talk escalated into a heated argument, and Hall stabbed his boyhood friend five times.

Hall fled but was arrested at his home later that night.

“I feel pain, sadness, remorse and guilt,” Hall wrote in a letter to San Fernando Superior Court Judge Malcolm MacKey. “I loved Dennis. . . . He was the brother I never had.

“Every day I think of Dennis, I hurt inside,” he wrote. “I died with him.” Deputy Dist. Atty. Candace Foy-Smith argued that Hall should be sent to state prison because of the violence and seriousness of the crime.

Hall stood trial and was convicted as an adult, although the killing occurred when he was 17. At his sentencing Monday, his attorney asked that Hall be sent to the California Youth Authority so he could participate in programs designed specifically for troubled teen-agers.

Hall told a county probation officer that he began smoking marijuana and drinking alcohol when he was 10 years old. By the time he was 14, he snorted cocaine daily and took LSD between four and six times a week. Hall was expelled from four San Fernando Valley junior high schools before graduating and dropped out of Kennedy High School in the middle of his junior year.