Kevin Murray

Kevin Murray died on Tuesday, November 10, 2026, at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles. He was 66. The Los Angeles Sentinel reported his death on November 12, 2026, and MyNewsLA and other outlets followed. No cause of death was made public. He is survived by his wife, Janice, their two children and his sister, Melinda. Funeral and memorial arrangements had not been announced at the time of reporting.

Kevin Girard Murray was born on March 12, 1960, in Los Angeles, California. His father, Willard H. Murray Jr., was an aerospace engineer when Kevin was born and later became a political consultant and a member of the California State Assembly. His mother, Barbara (née Farris), had studied at the University of Illinois, and Murray noted that it was unusual at the time for both African American parents to have attended college. His parents married in 1956, and his sister Melinda was born in 1964.

The family settled in the View Park area of Los Angeles in 1962, and his father lived in the same house for the rest of his life. Murray grew up around politics. He and his sister were brought along to campaign events, he remembered attending the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago with his parents, and his father was involved in the coalition that elected Tom Bradley as mayor of Los Angeles. He also recalled the Watts riots of 1965 from his childhood.

Murray attended Windsor Hills Elementary School, Paul Revere Junior High School and Palisades High School, a placement he credited to his mother's determination. He studied accounting and business administration at California State University, Northridge, choosing accounting, he said, for practical reasons, and joined the Phi Beta Sigma fraternity. He earned an MBA from Loyola Marymount University in 1983 and a Juris Doctor from Loyola Law School in 1987. He was a member of the State Bar of California and a licensed real estate broker.

Murray started at the William Morris Agency in 1982 in its mailroom program and became an agent in the music division, later working across corporate consulting, music, television and film. Before entering politics he also practiced entertainment, real estate, insurance and dependency law.

State Assembly (1994 to 1998). Elected from the 47th District in 1994, he served alongside his father, making them the first father and son to serve together in the California Legislature. He chaired the Assembly Transportation Committee and authored AB 157, the Consumer Protection: Identity Theft Act, which made identity theft a crime in California and which he described as the first such law in the nation.

State Senate (1998 to 2006). Representing the 26th District, based in Culver City, he chaired the Appropriations Committee, the Transportation Committee, the Elections Committee, the Select Committee on the Entertainment Industry, the Senate Democratic Caucus and the California Legislative Black Caucus. His work included SB 1102, the 2000 racial profiling law; recording artist protections; anti spyware and DNA privacy bills; support for the park bonds in Propositions 12 and 40, which created the Murray Hayden Urban Parks Program and the Baldwin Hills Conservancy; and SB 1, the Million Solar Roofs bill. He left the Senate because of term limits in 2006.

After the Legislature. He returned to the William Morris Agency in 2007 as a senior vice president, joined the board of Premier Power Renewable Energy in December 2008, and founded The Murray Group, a legal and consulting firm. In 2011 he became president and CEO of the Weingart Center Association, which under his leadership expanded from a single Skid Row facility to multiple interim and permanent supportive housing sites, including Weingart Tower 1, opened in June 2024. He also served on the boards of the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency, California American Water, Hawaii American Water and the Central City Association.

Murray met his wife, Janice, at the Congressional Black Caucus annual conference in Washington, D.C., in September 1999. She was a lawyer who had worked in Congress, at the White House and at the Federal Communications Commission. They were engaged by the following February and married in September 2000, after which she moved to Los Angeles. Their daughter was born in November 2001, and the couple had two children in all. Murray said that becoming a father changed how he worked as a senator, leading him to travel home from Sacramento far more often during the week.

His father, Willard H. Murray Jr., died on December 20, 2021. His mother died before his first campaign in 1994; a mailer from his sister Melinda in that race told voters their mother would have sent it herself.

Murray described himself as wanting to be more a legislator than a politician, and said he learned from Willie Brown and from his father that voters respond to personal connection more than to position papers. He opposed California's three strikes law and harsher sentencing in the 1990s, pushed to equalize drug penalties, and supported protections for gay Californians and people living with HIV. He was an early advocate of solar energy and of urban parks for communities that had few of them. In later years he argued that homelessness was in part the product of institutional racism, and he favoured building attractive, well serviced housing in poor neighborhoods. His advice to young people interested in politics was simply to show up and volunteer.

Murray's legislative record includes one of the earliest identity theft laws in the United States, California's racial profiling ban for law enforcement, the Million Solar Roofs bill, and hundreds of millions of dollars for urban parks through the Murray Hayden program and the Baldwin Hills Conservancy. His partnership with his father in the Assembly remains a notable first in California political history. At the Weingart Center he oversaw a major expansion of supportive housing on and beyond Skid Row, culminating in Weingart Tower 1. His legacy there is complicated by the Cheviot Hills purchase that came under federal scrutiny in his final year.

In September 2024 the Weingart Center, under Murray's leadership, received the Supportive Housing Developer of the Year award from the Southern California Association of Nonprofit Housing (SCANPH). In 2021 he was interviewed for the California State Archives State Government Oral History Program, conducted by the Oral History Center of the Bancroft Library at UC Berkeley and released in 2023.

Murray's five hour oral history, recorded in May 2021 by Roger Eardley-Pryor, covers his childhood, entertainment career and legislation, and is published by the California State Archives and UC Berkeley, with excerpts on YouTube. He appeared often in Los Angeles media as Weingart CEO, including a 2011 Time Warner Cable Local Edition interview, KNX News features in 2021 and 2024, and coverage of the Weingart Tower opening by ABC7 and the Los Angeles Times.

In 2025 the Los Angeles Times and LAist reported that Weingart had agreed in July 2023 to pay 27.3 million dollars, largely from state Homekey and city funds, for a Cheviot Hills senior housing site on Shelby Drive that a company tied to developer Steven Taylor was simultaneously buying for 11.2 million dollars. Murray signed the purchase agreement. He told the Los Angeles Times that he had no prior relationship with the seller and no continuing relationship, and that taxpayers paid fair market value. Federal prosecutors charged Taylor with fraud related offences in October 2025. Weingart placed Murray and its real estate development director on leave around November 1, 2025, while an outside law firm reviewed project valuations, and in December 2025 Murray resigned from the Los Angeles County Affordable Housing Solutions Agency board, to which Mayor Karen Bass had appointed him. No charges against Murray himself were reported. Weingart later sued Taylor, alleging he had concealed deal terms.