Honolulu Lite
Hollywood stars and movie industry executives came to Waikiki last week to see a comedy and instead were witness to a tragedy and horror show. Embarrassingly, for Hawaii, it was a rerun. Death of a good man an
all-too-common tale in HawaiiOn the same day that the red carpet was rolled out at the Waikiki Twins to welcome celebrities such as Tia Carrere to the Hawaii premiere of the Disney animated movie "Lilo & Stitch," a violent, mentally ill man with a criminal record ran amok along the Ala Wai Canal, killing one and injuring two others.
Home-grown actor Jason Scott Lee, one of the "voices" in the Disney movie, probably had a hard time vocalizing to the out-of-town guests that the Ala Wai incident wasn't merely a tragic, isolated incident, but an all-too-frequent occurrence in a place where killers are let out of prison after serving only a year or two and never face jail at all if they can convince a judge they are mentally ill.
What made Tuesday's incident more painful to those of us at the Star-Bulletin is the fact that the man who died was Jack Wyatt, a longtime free-lance writer for this paper who, at 71 years old, was one of the most physically fit people I had ever met.
I wasn't a close friend, but from the time I joined the paper more than 20 years ago, I ran into Jack often, not in the newsroom, but all over the island. See, Jack was a walker, a runner and a bike rider. He was what we would call a "fitness freak" in the old days. But he wasn't one of sanctimonious "look at me, I'm in better shape than you are" kind of guys. He just depended on foot-power to get him wherever he was going.
And wherever he was going, he showed up with a smile, a big Red Skelton kind of smile. The last time I saw him, he had hoofed it over to a cross-country meet that my daughter happened to be running in. He had hoofed it over to watch people run.
I never talked to Jack about it, but I suspect he stayed in good shape so that he could enjoy his twilight years by being both vertical and mobile.
I wish I could have introduced Jack Wyatt to the judges and mental health "experts" who allowed Cline Kahue to roam our streets. I would have said, "Look, here's Jack Wyatt who's been busting his ass day in and day out to be a good person, to stay fit, to contribute to society. He's made a big down payment on his golden years. He deserves to enjoy them. So when you are trying to figure out whether to let someone who is criminally insane, someone who has a history of violence and hurting other people, free on the street, think about Jack Wyatt."
But the judges and mental health experts, whose names we never learn, don't think about the Jack Wyatts of the world. Their job, as they see it, is to figure out whether people like Kahue, with a history of violent assaults, deserve to be set loose among us. Somehow, they figure that while Kahue is too mentally ill to stand trial for multiple assaults, he's A-OK for hanging out in Waikiki.
Which is what Kahue was doing on the morning he decided to shove 71-year-old Jack Wyatt to his death in the Ala Wai Canal.
It's a dramatic tale but would not make it to the big screen. Unlike in Hollywood, in Hawaii the hero always seems to die.
Charles Memminger, winner of National Society of Newspaper Columnists awards, appears Mondays, Wednesdays, Fridays and Sundays. E-mail cmemminger@starbulletin.com