Bullet to the
chest ends Kaua’s
latest standoff
Virtually an entire community
By Debra Barayuga
was held hostage before police were
able to wound the gunman
and Jaymes Song
Star-BulletinWhen sheriffs deputies tried to serve a parole violation warrant on Wayman Kaua two weeks ago, he bolted.
When sheriffs deputies tried to serve him with a probation violation warrant in 1990, Kaua also panicked.
Both led to standoffs with police. One ended peacefully. The other ended with Kaua being shot by a police sharpshooter yesterday.
"When he ran, we knew he was going to have problems and asked the sheriffs to put him at the top of the list," said Al Beaver, chairman of the Hawaii Paroling Authority. "It was to protect him from himself."
Kaua was shot once in the chest yesterday as he emerged from a Pearl City home with a rifle pointed at his wife's neck, ending a 22-hour standoff.
Kaua, 30, came out the front door of the two-story home at 1938 Waimano Home Road at 3:44 p.m.
After being shot, Kaua and his wife, Chanel Kaua, fell to the ground. Chanel Kaua grabbed the rifle and tossed it away from her husband.
She then ran for safety as Honolulu police SWAT members swarmed Kaua as he attempted to get back into the home.
Kaua and his wife were taken to Queen's Hospital. Chanel Kaua suffered minor injuries to the right side of her neck and was kept in the hospital for observation. She remains at the hospital in fair condition today.
Wayman Kaua was reported in critical condition, but police described him as alert and talking immediately following the shooting.
Wayman Kaua was convicted for firearms possession in the 1990 standoff, when he was barricaded in an Ewa Beach home with his then-girlfriend, who was pregnant, and her infant son for three hours. He was paroled in August 1997. Kaua had lost his job before the 1990 standoff.
He and his girlfriend married in 1992, and after he was released last year, he tried to piece his life back together. He focused on his family. He found a job. He was getting substance abuse treatment.
"He was going through a pretty good period of parole, until he got laid off," Beaver said.
Domestic and financial problems followed. The parole officer assigned to Kaua noted Kaua was relapsing, and upped their weekly meetings to twice a week.
"He was a typical profile of a parolee going through these problems," Beaver said. "Their way of escape is relapsing, and when there are indications this is occurring, we try to bring him back in to straighten his life out again."
That's why deputies were sent to arrest him two weeks ago, when he fled, and why they showed up looking for him at a Pearl City home Thursday.Kaua's record includes nine misdemeanors and a felony arrest as a juvenile, but all were dismissed. He spent some time at the juvenile home in Koolau.
After he turned 18, he was arrested for a series of misdemeanors. He was convicted of three felonies, including a robbery in 1987 for which he was put on probation. He violated probation twice but was released because he wasn't deemed a problem to society, just to himself, Beaver said.
Kaua would have been a free man after his parole expired in March 2001.
"He's one of those guys who's run the gamut of the criminal justice system, and I'm afraid he's exhausted everything," Beaver said.
After Kaua fled two weeks ago, the Hawaii Paroling Authority put an all-points bulletin out for him.
On Thursday, Pearl City police received a tip that Kaua was at the Pearl City home.
When officers went to the house at 3:43 p.m. Thursday, Kaua fired three shots at two officers, said Deputy Police Chief William Clark.
Three minutes later, an officer reported being shot at four times by Kaua while in his car. Two people in the home escaped at that time, and two women remained. Police SWAT members were called to the scene.
At 4:56 p.m. all the roads in the area were closed. Neighboring homes were evacuated. Hundreds of others who were inside their homes were ordered to stay there. An overnight shelter was set up for people who could not reach their homes. Three schools were also eventually closed.
Clark said negotiations with Kaua were going very well just up to the shooting when they became "very erratic." However, gunshots were reported four times from inside the home.
In a standoff hostage situation, police actions are dictated by the behavior of the suspect, not by time, Clark said.
At 7:30 a.m. yesterday, one woman, 33, was released safely, and only Kaua's wife remained.
Police would not comment on Kaua's motive or whether he was on any drugs or alcohol.
Kaua's family described Kaua as a "good man and a good father." Kaua has four young children.
Clark said a standoff ending in a suspect being shot is never an "enjoyable situation."
"But we're happy no officers were injured and that people can enjoy Halloween with their families," he said.
Assistant Chief Boisse Correa said the standoff had a bigger impact on the community because there was only one road going in and out of the area.
"We've had situations like this in the past, and there are going to be more like this in the future," he said. "It's just a part of living in a big city."
Weary residents get
By Mary Adamski
back to normal after siege
Star-BulletinHundreds of Pacific Palisades residents were happy to sleep in their own beds last night after spending Thursday stranded by police roadblocks during a hostage standoff.
About 200 Pacific Palisades residents spent the night at the Pearl City Recreation Center, and another 200 stayed at Our Lady of Good Counsel Church.
"We waited here until midnight thinking it would be over," said Kellen Ushijima, whose family was packing up to leave the recreation center nearly 24 hours later. He and his wife, Nani, and son, Kellen, 9, spent the night together, unlike other families who were split by the emergency situation.
They came to the park for a softball game and had planned a potluck meal with the other boys' families. After lingering, they eventually spent the night with Nani's mother.
Stranded people were free to drive downhill during the siege, but at least 200 of them were fed at each of three shelters operated by Red Cross staff and volunteers. Lunch was served yesterday to about 100 at the recreation center.
Unsolicited food donations from Pizza Hut, Domino's, Zippy's and McDonald's restaurants poured in for the temporary refugees at the shelters, said Cynthia Miller of the Red Cross.
Also there were drinks from Meadow Gold and Menehune Water, snacks from Sam's Club and Signature Theatre, and blankets and towels from Pali Momi and Kaiser hospitals and Kahi Mohala Healthcare.
"It was an adventure for the kids," said Mel Acosta of Pearl City, one of the hundreds of people in the hilltop community cut off from returning downhill because a stretch of Komo Mai Drive was potentially in the gun sights from Wayman Kaua's cliffside house.
Acosta was one of about three dozen parents who took their sons to a softball game at Palisades Elementary School Thursday afternoon. The visitors from Ewa Beach, Halawa and Pearl City spent the night with various Palisades hosts. A Pearl Harbor Naval Shipyard worker, Acosta was one of many people unable to get to work yesterday.
Some 24 of the children and adults spent the night with Cherie and Bobby Young, whose Aaniu Place home became the food-dispensing center for police and neighbors as well. Dozens of people gathered at the roadblock nearby, the top end of the Komo Mai Drive closure.
Meanwhile, two of the Youngs' three children were stranded downhill and spent the night with friends.
"It's wasn't too bad," said a weary Cherie Young, although daughter Cassidee, 9, didn't agree. She missed the Halloween party at her Kamehameha Schools class.
The adventure for the ballplayers climaxed with a ride out, five at a time, in a Humvee military transport early yesterday. They met their waiting families downhill.
The family dog was the first concern of Walter Yamatsuka of Aamaka Place, who headed uphill as soon as the roadblocks were lifted yesterday. He and his wife and daughter stayed with relatives. The pooch, tended to by a neighbor Thursday night, did nothing to impinge on his potty training, his owner reported.
Next door, retiree Abraham Resents said: "I didn't know I was stuck. I didn't know anything unusual was happening until I tried to get out to pick up a newspaper" yesterday morning.
"I could last for a long time stranded," said Resents, raising a beer, as he watched his somewhat deserted street began to fill up with returning residents.
Acosta and his son were among those evacuated by Humvee. But he was still stranded at the Pearl City Recreation Center yesterday afternoon, waiting for a ride back up to the school where his car was parked.
"It's getting to be a pretty long day," he said.
Ranier Schaefer, a seventh-grader at Pearl City Highlands Elementary School, said: "I came to school in my same clothes as yesterday. I didn't brush my teeth, either."
He said he and his father, Thomas Schaefer, a construction worker, camped for the night at a house under construction.
