Man guilty in attempt to kidnap ex-girlfriend

A state jury last week found a man who was acquitted of murder in the shooting death of his ex-girlfriend guilty of trying to kidnap her six months before the shooting.

The jury found Toi Nofoa guilty Wednesday of attempted kidnapping and terroristic threatening.

Nofoa, 38, faces up to 10 years in prison for the attempted kidnapping. He was facing a 20-year prison term when he went to trial last week on kidnapping charges.

This was the second time Nofoa stood trial for allegedly abducting Royal Kaukani from her workplace in Ko Olina in September 2008.

In the first trial in 2012, another jury found him guilty of kidnapping and he was later sentenced to 20 years in prison. The Hawaii Supreme Court overturned the conviction because the trial judge improperly allowed the prosecutor to use Kaukani’s preliminary hearing testimony as evidence against Nofoa and improperly allowed the prosecutor to tell the jurors in closing arguments that they didn’t hear from Kaukani directly because she was dead.

The jurors in this week’s trial did not hear Kaukani’s recorded preliminary hearing testimony nor were told that she is dead.

Nofoa was acquitted in 2011 of murder in connection with Kaukani’s March 2009 death. Kaukani, 25, was shot in the back of her neck and in her face as she sat behind the wheel of her sport utility vehicle in an Ewa neighborhood. At the time of the shooting a warrant was out for Nofoa’s arrest for failing to appear for a court hearing in the kidnapping case.