Her younger sister said Teresita Dumalan Hernane worked hard to support her adopted son Charly because she loved him so much.
"The love of my sister to give to her adopted son is more than anything else, more than herself," Leonida Aquino said Tuesday.
Aquino said Charly Hernane was quiet and didn’t express himself. He killed his mother in the Kalihi home they shared with Aquino and other extended family members.
Circuit Judge Rom Trader sentenced Hernane, 29, to a mandatory life prison term for murder Tuesday.
A jury found Hernane guilty in August.
Hernane did not testify in the trial or at his sentencing.
The Hawaii Paroling Authority will decide how long he will have to spend behind bars before he is eligible for parole.
Other family members described Hernane as a loner, introverted, unsociable and even scary.
Aquino said only now is she able to express relief over the time Hernane chased her with a kitchen knife.
Because he socially cut himself off from others, prosecutor Darrell Wong said, only Hernane knows why he killed his mother. He said one of three court-appointed mental health experts who examined Hernane suggested that his methamphetamine dependence affected his thinking and influenced him to kill his mother.
"Perhaps (it was) a desire to punish his aunt for taking him away from his true, true family," Wong said.
Teresita Hernane and her husband adopted Charly, who was her husband’s nephew, when he was an infant in the Philippines.
She moved to Hawaii in 1994 after separating from her husband and later brought Charly to live with her.
Teresita Hernane, 56, died May 21, 2011, of a stroke and injury to her jugular vein caused by a stab wound to her face. She suffered from hypertension, and the forensic pathologist who performed the autopsy said the knife attack could have precipitated the stroke.
Police found a butcher knife near her body. They found Charly Hernane sleeping outside the gymnasium at Kalakaua District Park nearby wearing shorts and a shirt stained with his mother’s blood.
