For more than two years, people who were not yet born when Lyle and Erik Menendez murdered their parents powered a push to free the brothers from prison.

Joined by lawyers and family members and fueled by documentaries, podcasts, news conferences and social media posts, they were remarkably successful in generating attention, so much so that after more than three decades in prison, the brothers found themselves this week in front of the California’s Board of Parole Hearings.

Almost 36 years to the day that they killed their parents, Jose and Kitty, inside their Beverly Hills home, the brothers seemed as close as ever to rejoining their clan.

“I am so sorry to everyone,” Lyle, now 57, said through tears on Friday, “and I will be forever sorry.”

But to the parole board members who decided the brothers’ fate on Thursday and Friday in separate hearings, sorry was far from enough.

After reviewing hundreds of pages of documents and listening to hours of testimony over video, the two panels, with two members each, swiftly denied the brothers parole. The momentum that had been building for years came to a halt in a matter of minutes. The social-media campaigns of the young had collided with the hard-line parole system of the old.