Pearl City hostage
By Debra Barayuga
taker goes on trial
Star-BulletinConvicted felon Wayman Kaua didn't want to go back to prison after he tested positive for crystal methamphetamine.
"F--- prison, f--- parole, f--- you," he told a parole officer on the phone after he eluded sheriff's deputies who were trying to arrest him for parole violations.
So in October 1998, he embarked on a series of actions to ensure that didn't happen.
Kaua -- who barricaded himself in a Pacific Palisades home with his wife and a female hostage and paralyzed the Pearl City community for 24 hours -- went on trial today in Circuit Judge Wendell Huddy's courtroom.
Kaua is charged with attempted murder, kidnapping, first-degree terroristic threatening, reckless endangering and owning and possessing a prohibited firearm.
In opening statements today, city Prosecutor Peter Carlisle said Kaua acted in an "impulsive killing rage" when he shot repeatedly at police officers who surrounded the Pacific Palisades home where he lived with his wife.
One of the officers he fired at with a high-powered rifle was in a valley below, nearly two football fields away next to a church and preschool, Carlisle said.
During the standoff, Kaua took a female resident hostage for 16 hours. But when he realized even that wouldn't prevent him from going back to prison, he decided he would die, not by his own hand, but by making police shoot him, Carlisle said.
Several times he marched his hostage and his wife outside on a balcony, holding them by the hair at gunpoint and taunted police to shoot him.
"If you don't shoot me, I'll shoot her," he told them.
Kaua was later shot in the head by a police marksman.
