She Had Ten Days Between Leaving Him and Dying. California’s Own Numbers Show Why Its Gun Laws Might Not Have Saved Her Anyway.
On the morning of February 16, 2024, Brittany Elizabeth Ligdis called 911 from the laundry room of her Pinole home, where she was hiding with her four-year-old son. Her ex-boyfriend, Jeffery Kendall, had broken in. Ninety seconds into the recorded call, according to prosecutors, he found her. “Let go of me,” she told him. “You’re scaring him.” Then: “Stop it.” He shot her in the head. Their son ran from the room crying for his mother.
On May 7, 2026, a Contra Costa County jury convicted Kendall, now 39, of first-degree murder and child endangerment. On July 31, Superior Court Judge Glenn Kim sentenced him to 50 years to life. Deputy District Attorney Tylyn Wells told the court it was “an execution in front of a 4-year-old child” — not, she argued, a man’s mental break, but the familiar shape of domestic violence escalating once a victim tries to leave.
Ligdis had ended the relationship ten days earlier. No restraining order appears anywhere in the public record of this case. What the case does expose, on the record, is the system California built to catch cases like it — a restraining-order and gun-relinquishment apparatus the state’s own Department of Justice has spent years describing, in its own reports, as backlogged, unevenly enforced, and structurally blind to exactly the kind of weapon Kendall used.
- 50 years to life the sentence Jeffery Kendall received for first-degree murder and child endangerment — Contra Costa County DA's Office
- 10 days how long Brittany Ligdis had between ending the relationship and her death — Contra Costa County DA's Office
- 25,911 people on California's own list of prohibited gun owners as of Jan. 1, 2025 — the backlog its relinquishment law depends on clearing — CA DOJ, 2025 APPS Annual Report
California Highway Patrol officers arrested Kendall in Santa Cruz, more than 70 miles from the Pinole home where Ligdis died, hours after the killing. Investigators later determined the gun he used was a 3D-printed pistol built to fire semi-automatically — a weapon with no serial number, purchased from no dealer, and invisible to the background-check system that governs every licensed firearm sale in California. The jury convicted Kendall not only of murder and child endangerment but of illegally possessing that weapon.
Wells, the deputy district attorney who tried the case, told jurors the killing fit a pattern prosecutors say they see often: not a breakdown, but an escalation, timed to the moment a victim asserts control by leaving. Kendall’s sentence bars him from contacting his son — who was four when he watched his father kill his mother — until November 2035, when the boy turns 16.
Brittany Ligdis' 911 call caught the whole thing: her silently pleading for help from dispatchers, her 4-year-old son recognizing his father, and then a gunshot moments later.
California runs its domestic-violence protections on two connected tracks: a restraining order a victim petitions a court for, and a firearm-relinquishment process that is supposed to follow automatically once one is granted. Both assume something Ligdis’s case did not allow — time to act before an abuser escalates. Courts across California field roughly 72,000 domestic-violence restraining-order requests a year, the investigative outlet CalMatters found; getting one heard, served, and enforced against an armed partner is rarely a same-day process anywhere in the state.
That gap is dangerous because separation, not the relationship itself, is when partners turn lethal. A landmark 2003 case-control study in the American Journal of Public Health found a woman’s risk of being killed by a partner rises roughly five-fold when he has access to a gun, and that estrangement from a controlling partner is among the strongest predictors of femicide. The CDC’s most recent national review of intimate partner homicide — 2018 through 2021 — counted nearly 4,000 women killed by partners in four years, and found that states requiring abusers under restraining orders to surrender firearms see measurably fewer of those deaths. California is one of them, and its Department of Justice reports real, decades-long progress: domestic-violence gun homicides there fell 61% between 1993 and 2019. But the same report notes a majority of California’s female homicide victims are still killed by an intimate partner or family member. Ten days is not much time to navigate a restraining-order process built for less urgent cases.
Even when a restraining order is granted, California’s own investigators have found the gun-surrender side of the system barely functions. As of January 1, 2025, the state’s Armed and Prohibited Persons System — the database meant to track every Californian legally barred from owning a firearm — carried 25,911 names, according to the Department of Justice’s own 2025 annual report. Special agents removed roughly 10,700 people from that list in 2025 and recovered 1,437 firearms statewide. The backlog has not meaningfully shrunk; new prohibited owners are added faster than the state’s Bureau of Firearms, roughly 75 authorized positions in total, can clear them.
The gap is sharpest around domestic violence specifically. A 2021 CalMatters investigation found nearly 4,600 of the people then on the prohibited-persons list had lost their gun rights through a domestic-violence restraining order — and that fewer than half of California’s 58 superior courts had access to the state database showing what firearms an abuser had legally purchased in the first place. Sacramento County’s own Domestic Violence Death Review Team concluded in 2019 that “proactive enforcement” of firearm-relinquishment orders in the county was “currently nonexistent.” CalMatters later documented what that looks like in practice: Calley Garay, a 32-year-old Chowchilla mother, filed a restraining order in June 2020 detailing her husband’s threats to kill her with a gun. The court imposed minimal firearm restrictions and verified none of them. He shot her to death in a clinic parking lot the following July, in front of their three children, and was later convicted and sentenced to life without parole.
District Attorney Diana Becton (D) — Contra Costa County District Attorney; her office prosecuted Kendall, and Deputy DA Tylyn Wells secured the 50-years-to-life sentence.
Attorney General Rob Bonta (D) — heads the California Department of Justice, which publishes the Armed and Prohibited Persons System backlog and the ghost-gun data cited in this story; his office has repeatedly acknowledged the enforcement gaps in its own reports.
Governor Gavin Newsom (D) — oversees the executive branch responsible for staffing and funding the Bureau of Firearms, which a 2021 CalMatters investigation found had roughly a third of its authorized positions vacant.
There is a second, more structural problem, and it would exist even if every restraining order in California were enforced perfectly: an unserialized, homemade firearm is invisible to a system built entirely around registered ones. Kendall’s gun was 3D-printed. California banned mere possession of unserialized firearms under Assembly Bill 1621, effective January 1, 2024 — six weeks before he used one to kill Ligdis. The law did not stop him from building it.
“Then I'll just build another one.”
A domestic-violence suspect, told by investigators he was legally barred from possessing a firearm under a court order · cited in the California DOJ's October 2024 ghost-gun report
Attorney General Bonta’s own Office of Gun Violence Prevention documented that exchange in an October 2024 report on the state’s ghost-gun crisis. The same report found ghost-gun recoveries tied to domestic-violence and abuse crimes rose more than 1,200% between 2013 and 2021. Of the 1,437 firearms California’s prohibited-persons agents seized statewide in 2025, only 10 were ghost guns — not necessarily because they are rare in domestic-violence cases, but because a gun with no serial number and no purchase record is largely invisible to a relinquishment system built to search for guns the state already knows exist.
Ligdis was a nursing student at Diablo Valley College when she died, working toward a transfer to a four-year program. At the college’s commencement that May, professor Valerie Greene read her name into the record anyway, and classmates accepted her degree on stage in her place. “She would’ve been such a compassionate nurse,” one of them, Christina George, told KTVU. On the first anniversary of her death, Ligdis’s mother, Cathy, spoke publicly for the first time, asking that her daughter’s killing be treated as a warning rather than a headline. The National Domestic Violence Hotline, 800-799-7233, operates around the clock for anyone who needs it.
None of this is a claim that a restraining order would have saved Brittany Ligdis — the record contains no indication she sought one, and no one connected to her case has said otherwise. It is a claim that the system California built for the women who do seek one carries a 25,911-person backlog, a documented history of courts that do not verify compliance, and no real answer yet for a gun that was never registered in the first place. Those are the state’s own findings, published under its own name, about the law meant to catch exactly this kind of killing before it happens.
California’s Department of Justice reports a 61% drop in domestic-violence gun homicides since 1993 — real progress, by its own numbers. It also reports 25,911 people still on its list of prohibited gun owners, a court system where fewer than half of judges can check what guns an abuser purchased, and a homemade-firearm loophole its own investigators have watched an abuser boast about exploiting. Brittany Ligdis’s killer used exactly that kind of gun. The state did not need this story to find these gaps. Its own agencies already published them.
