Mother ‘disturbed’ by killer’s release after 2015 shooting of Grant High football star
Jaulon “J.J.” Clavo’s killer was freed early from confinement this week in the murder of the Grant Union High School student just blocks from his campus, a little more than seven years after the November 2015 ambush shooting that felled the star athlete at 17 years old, leaving Clavo’s mother with one bitter question:
“What was my only son’s life worth?” Nicole Clavo said in a statement from the Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office announcing Keymontae Lindsey’s release from custody.
Lindsey, now 23, arrived at the state’s Department of Juvenile Justice in January 2020 to begin serving time for Clavo’s murder and the shooting of a second teen wounded in the ambush.
Tuesday, following new laws, court challenges and the back-and-forth between adult and youth courts, Lindsey was released following a juvenile sentencing hearing. A judge sided with a probation department report that called for his release.
“I am deeply disturbed and disappointed by the ruling today,” Clavo, manager of the Sacramento Office of Violence Prevention, said Tuesday in the DA’s statement. “To say my family and I have been on an emotional roller coaster since losing JJ in 2015 is a complete understatement. The legislature keeps changing the goalposts to favor the criminals.”
Lindsey was 15 when he opened fire at Clavo and a car full of his football teammates at a North Sacramento intersection, hours before a playoff game on the Grant campus. A single gunshot killed Clavo. Another shot wounded a teammate. Lindsey fled after firing the fatal shot and was in hiding for three months before he was captured by police.
“The murder was gang motivated, unprovoked and a premeditated ambush killing,” DA’s officials said in their lengthy statement following Lindsey’s release this week.
The deadly shooting broke the heart of the Del Paso Heights community and the close-knit Grant High family. It also trained new focus on juvenile offenders and the intensely charged debate over whether juveniles facing murder and other serious charges should stand trial in adult court.
Had Lindsey been convicted of Clavo’s murder in adult court, angry Sacramento prosecutors reminded this week, he could have been sentenced to 87 years to life in state prison.
Instead, Lindsey will remain under the supervision of the juvenile probation department until he turns 25 years old in May 2025.
Prosecutors charged Lindsey as an adult in Sacramento criminal court in early 2016, with the teen Lindsey initially facing counts of murder, attempted murder, discharge of a firearm and discharging a firearm at an occupied vehicle in Clavo’s death.
But later in 2016, Lindsey’s case was returned to juvenile court after voters passed Proposition 57.
Prop 57 mandated juvenile court judges decide whether minors younger that 16 are tried as adults for murder and other serious crimes. A Sacramento juvenile judge ruled that Lindsey could stand trial as an adult and prosecutors were ready to move forward.
But a second law took effect in January 2019. Senate Bill 1391 barred prosecution of any 14- or 15-year-old as an adult and later survived a state Supreme Court challenge. Lindsey’s case would again return to youth court. Nicole Clavo would join prosecutors and crime victims across California in public efforts to overturn the law.
Then-Sacramento County DA Anne Marie Schubert in March 2019 said of the new law: “Individuals exercised extraordinary violence for no other reason that to exercise violence. We exercised the law and that law has been ripped from underneath” crime victims.
A Sacramento juvenile judge found later that summer that Lindsey committed the crimes. But Lindsey did not stay in state custody for long, his term reduced several times before he was returned to Sacramento County juvenile custody in May.
