diff --git a/CHANGES.txt b/CHANGES.txt
index 4ac7b2f70d9..d0440db97af 100644
--- a/CHANGES.txt
+++ b/CHANGES.txt
@@ -158,6 +158,8 @@ Release 0.20.0 - Unreleased
                their region assignments from the last master
    HBASE-1457  Taking down ROOT/META regionserver can result in cluster
                becoming in-operational (Ryan Rawson via Stack)
+   HBASE-1471  During cluster shutdown, deleting zookeeper regionserver nodes
+               causes exceptions
 
   IMPROVEMENTS
    HBASE-1089  Add count of regions on filesystem to master UI; add percentage
diff --git a/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java b/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
index 9f686bcf04b..0438a0076a4 100644
--- a/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
+++ b/src/java/org/apache/hadoop/hbase/zookeeper/ZooKeeperWrapper.java
@@ -529,7 +529,7 @@ public class ZooKeeperWrapper implements HConstants {
       List<String> nodes = zooKeeper.getChildren(rsZNode, false);
       for (String node : nodes) {
         LOG.debug("Deleting node: " + node);
-        zooKeeper.delete(node, -1);
+        zooKeeper.delete(joinPath(this.rsZNode, node), -1);
       }
     } catch (KeeperException e) {
       LOG.warn("Failed to delete " + rsZNode + " znode in ZooKeeper: " + e);