Purported witness in Kealoha case disputes court documents

A man whose name appears on a state court document that city Deputy Prosecutor Katherine Kea­loha is accused of falsifying says he never met Kealoha and has no idea how his signature wound up on the document.

The document purports to verify that Ransen Taito, a ward of Kealoha’s, received all of his share of a medical malpractice settlement when he turned 18.

Taito, 26, pleaded guilty in U.S. District Court on Jan. 5 to conspiring with Kealoha to obstruct an FBI investigation into what happened to the money and to impede a related federal grand jury proceeding. He told U.S. District Chief Judge J. Michael Seabright that he knowingly signed multiple false documents Kealoha presented to him and lied to the grand jury because Kealoha convinced him that if he told the truth — that he didn’t receive the money — his mother would go to jail.

Taito’s lawyer, Michael Green, said Kealoha had falsely told Taito that she had given his money to his mother.

Kealoha was one of the lawyers who had negotiated the medical malpractice settlement involving a misdiagnosis of Taito’s father. She was appointed by state Circuit Judge Colleen Hirai in 2004 as the guardian of about $167,000 that had been awarded to Taito and his sister, who at the time were 12 and 10 years old. Kealoha was an attorney in private practice.

After Taito turned 18, Kealoha submitted documents telling the state court that Taito received all of his share of the settlement money. One of the documents, on which Taito’s signature appears twice, is a verification by Taito. The document also includes the signatures of two witnesses.

One of the witnesses, Elson Honda, says the signature appears to be his. But he says he had never met Taito or Kealoha.

The document in the official court record is not the original, but a photocopy. The date next to Honda’s signature appears to be Aug. 8, 2011, even though the document has a receive date of Sept. 13, 2010, stamped on it.

Kealoha submitted the same document again on Aug. 12, 2011, in an addendum to her earlier filing. This time the document, again a photocopy, not the original, contains just one Taito signature and does not contain Honda’s.

Taito told Seabright that within hours after lying, at Kealoha’s instruction, to a federal grand jury in April 2016, he met with Kealoha at Like Like Drive Inn, where he told her what he said to the grand jury. He said Kealoha also had him sign various pieces of paper, some of them blank, using pens of different color inks.

At the time, Taito said he thought Kealoha was giving him different pens because they were running out of ink.

Federal prosecutors say Kealoha gave Taito pens of different color inks to make it appear that he had signed the documents at different times.

After nearly two years of hearing testimony and receiving evidence from prosecutors, the grand jury returned an indictment in October charging Kealoha and her husband, former Honolulu police Chief Louis Kealoha, with bank fraud for claiming Taito and his sister’s medical malpractice settlement money as their own on loan and mortgage applications.

The indictment also charges the Kealohas and four former members of the Honolulu Police Department’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit with conspiracy, obstructing justice and lying to investigators in an alleged frame-up of Katherine Kealoha’s uncle, with whom she was involved in a bitter dispute over money.

Kealoha’s court-appointed criminal defense lawyer, Cynthia Kagiwada, did not respond to requests for comment.