A statewide charging ruling interrupted the prosecution, but a grand jury revived the case before Kendall Ramsey’s 2026 conviction.
HONOLULU, Hawaii — When criminal charges against Kendall Ramsey were dismissed in 2022, the ruling did not settle whether he was responsible for the deaths of his girlfriend and infant son. It reset the way prosecutors had to bring the case. Four years later, an Oahu jury has convicted him of first-degree murder.
The procedural detour is a defining feature of a prosecution that began in March 2020, when Kayla Holder, 23, and her 6-month-old son, Kainoa Ramsey, were found dead in an Ewa Beach apartment. Ramsey was arrested after a crash several hours later and initially charged by criminal complaint with first-degree murder, two counts of second-degree murder and second-degree attempted murder. In 2022, those charges were dismissed after a Hawaii Supreme Court decision held that serious felony cases had to be initiated through grand jury indictment. Prosecutors then presented the case to a grand jury, which returned a new indictment.
That history matters because a dismissal can sound like the end of a criminal case even when it is not. Ramsey’s 2022 dismissal resulted from the charging procedure rather than a jury finding that he had not committed the crimes. Hawaii News Now reported at the time that the court ruling placed scores of cases in legal uncertainty. Within days, prosecutors obtained a grand jury indictment accusing Ramsey again of first-degree murder, two second-degree murder counts and attempted murder. He remained in custody as the refiled prosecution moved toward trial.
By the time jurors heard the case in July 2026, the core dispute had shifted away from the charging process and toward Ramsey’s mental state at the time Holder and Kainoa were killed. Ramsey acknowledged that he caused both deaths, according to reporting on the proceedings. The defense asked jurors to find manslaughter rather than murder because, it argued, he was experiencing extreme emotional or mental disturbance. Prosecutors maintained that the physical evidence and circumstances established intentional and knowing killings of two people.
Jurors convicted Ramsey, now 28, of first-degree murder on July 31. They also convicted him of attempted assault in the first degree in connection with the vehicle collision after he left the apartment. First-degree murder applied to the allegation that Ramsey caused more than one death. The verdict represented the first jury determination of criminal liability in a case that had passed through two charging mechanisms and remained pending for more than six years.
The evidence returned jurors to the Sun Rise apartment complex in Ewa Beach. Police responded after a friend found Holder and Kainoa in the second-floor studio and called 911 during the early hours of March 26, 2020. Holder had sustained 38 stab wounds and the baby 17, prosecutors said at trial. Investigators also found writing in blood on a wall that included an apology and a statement that Ramsey stabbed Holder after she choked him. Prosecutors used the scene, the wounds and other physical evidence to argue that the killings could not reasonably be reduced to manslaughter.
Deputy Public Defender Hayley Cheng presented Ramsey’s history as essential to understanding what happened. The defense said he had endured childhood abuse and abandonment and suffered from complex post-traumatic stress disorder, depression and suicidal thinking. He had been dealing with unemployment and other stresses. An expert called by the defense discussed trauma and psychic numbing. Cheng described Ramsey as having reached a “breaking point” and argued that a final confrontation with Holder triggered a larger psychological collapse rather than a calculated plan to kill.
Prosecutors attacked both the legal conclusion the defense wanted jurors to draw and portions of the expert foundation supporting it. Deputy Prosecutor Scott Bell stressed the repeated wounds, evidence that Holder attempted to defend herself and Ramsey’s conduct after the deaths. Bell also challenged the breadth of the defense expert’s investigation, according to trial reporting. The state’s argument was that trauma in Ramsey’s past could be real without excusing or legally reducing his decisions during the attack.
Ramsey’s own reported statements became part of that conflict. After the killings, he told a hospital worker that he had been drinking, argued with Holder, lost his temper and blacked out before realizing she and Kainoa were dead. The defense connected those statements to evidence of a longstanding mental-health crisis. Prosecutors treated the account more skeptically, asking jurors to compare it with the scene and Ramsey’s subsequent conduct. In returning a murder verdict rather than manslaughter, jurors declined to give the defense theory the legal effect Ramsey sought.
The aftermath supplied another disputed piece of evidence. Prosecutors said Ramsey drove the wrong way on Kunia Road and directly toward an oncoming vehicle, hitting it despite the other driver’s attempt to avoid him. The defense described the crash as a suicide attempt. The original prosecution charged Ramsey with second-degree attempted murder for that conduct, and the 2022 grand jury repeated the accusation. At trial, jurors instead found him guilty of attempted assault in the first degree. Prosecutors said the jury also made a finding that could permit the court to impose an extended term.
While the legal case changed form, the underlying account of Holder and Kainoa remained consistent. Holder’s mother, Michelle Chamberlain, said in 2020 that she talked with her daughter by FaceTime shortly before the killings. Holder appeared normal during the conversation, Chamberlain said. She had moved to Hawaii in 2014, found work, joined the military and gone to school. When Kainoa was born, Chamberlain traveled from New York to be present for the arrival of her first grandchild.
Holder was serving in the Army Reserve, and the 9th Mission Support Command publicly mourned her death. Brig. Gen. Timony Connelly said she was part of the 25th Infantry Division Main Command Post-Operational Detachment and was an active participant who loved military service. Kainoa had traveled with Holder to meet relatives on the East Coast. Chamberlain remembered him as a gentle baby and said her daughter’s strongest love was the bond she had formed with her son.
Those family details entered the public record during the first days of the investigation, long before the Supreme Court charging decision or the eventual trial. The initial 2020 prosecution placed Ramsey’s bail at $2 million. Two years later, when the original charges were dismissed on procedural grounds, the state did not abandon the case. The new grand jury indictment restored the first-degree murder accusation and kept Ramsey detained while the prosecution continued.
The result illustrates the difference between a procedural dismissal and an adjudication on the evidence. The 2022 court development required prosecutors to use a different constitutional charging process. It did not produce a verdict on whether Ramsey committed the killings. The 2026 jury trial did. After hearing evidence about the deaths, the crash and Ramsey’s psychological condition, jurors found him criminally responsible for first-degree murder and attempted assault.
Honolulu Prosecutor Steve Alm called Holder and Kainoa’s deaths an “extraordinarily brutal act of domestic violence” after the verdict and said he hoped the result would provide their relatives some measure of justice. Ramsey remains in the Oahu Community Correctional Center without bail. Prosecutors have said he faces up to life imprisonment without the possibility of parole on the murder conviction, while the judge will also address the assault conviction and the jury’s extended-term finding.
The next proceeding will not revisit whether the grand jury was the proper way to charge Ramsey or ask another jury to choose between murder and manslaughter. Those stages have now passed. Ramsey is scheduled for sentencing Nov. 18, more than six years after Holder and Kainoa were killed and four years after the procedural dismissal briefly removed the original charges from the court docket. The remaining question is the sentence the court will impose on convictions that ultimately survived that unusual legal path.
Author note: Last updated September 9, 2026.