On the morning of February 24, 2020, a janitor at an adult bookstore in Oak Park, just north of Detroit, recognized a customer from the wanted notices and telephoned police. The man was Kenyel Brown, forty, sought for six killings in three Wayne County cities over eleven weeks. Officers chased him into the backyard of a nearby house, where he shot himself in the head. He was declared brain dead and died in a Detroit hospital on February 28.
Within two days of the chase the case had turned into something else. Detroit Police Chief James Craig told reporters that Brown had spent the months before the killings as a paid informant. He had first worked for the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, which asked a federal judge to end his supervised release early in October 2019; he had then been passed to a joint Detroit police and Drug Enforcement Administration task force, which signed him up on October 29 and paid him a hundred and fifty dollars for information about drug dealing by a gang in southwest Detroit. Craig said his department had no idea he was already a federal informant. While on federal supervision Brown had failed drug tests, been arrested for drunk driving and missed mandated counseling, violations that could have returned him to prison. He stayed free.
The killings, as police described them, began on December 7, 2019 and ended on February 22, 2020: three in River Rouge, two in Detroit and one in Highland Park, along with two carjackings and a shooting in which the victim lived. Craig said the motives were disputes over drugs and money, not random attacks. On January 29, 2020, according to a later lawsuit, Brown asked Clifton Smith to lend him money and was refused more than once; he then shot and killed Kimberly Green, and Dorian Paterson was killed in the same attack. Smith was shot twenty-three times and survived. Police believe Brown killed Amir Thaxton, an acquaintance, on East Eight Mile Road on Detroit’s east side. The other victims have not been named in the published reporting.
The task force deactivated Brown as an informant on February 3, 2020, the day his name surfaced in the River Rouge investigation. Police began searching for him three days later and the U.S. Marshals posted a reward. River Rouge charged him with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder, assault with intent to murder, assault with intent to do great bodily harm, being a felon in possession of a firearm and five felony firearm counts.
He was born in River Rouge on July 3, 1979. Court records cited in the Smith lawsuit put his first arrest in August 1997, for carrying a concealed weapon and assault with a dangerous weapon, for which he served a year in the Wayne County Jail. Other accounts of his record list a 1999 conviction for trying to sell a Taser, a dismissed 2001 narcotics arrest and a 2001 conviction for an offense causing death, sentenced as a fourth habitual offender. The lawsuit’s summary says instead that homicide charges brought against him between 1998 and 2020 were dropped. The two versions cannot both be right, and neither has been tested against the court files.
On March 3, 2020 Craig pulled Detroit officers out of the task force, which had run for more than twenty years, saying there had been a breach of trust and that the DEA would not acknowledge that Brown had been signed as a task force informant. The DEA’s Detroit chief said only that the agency remained committed to working with the department. Relatives of the dead asked how a man with Brown’s record had been on the street at all. In 2023 Clifton Smith sued the city of Detroit, arguing it had protected a violent man for his usefulness, and sought seventy-five thousand dollars in damages.
He was charged in two of the six deaths and tried in none. The other four rest on police attribution, and the attribution came from the same agencies whose handling of him was in question.