Kema case hit home for those who dedicated 20 years to it

Peter Kema Sr.’s long-awaited guilty plea Wednesday in his 6-year-old son’s 1997 death by no means ends the case for Hawaii County police and prosecutors who have worked on it for two decades.

They reflected on the case last week, sharing their insight and how it has touched them deeply.

“Family abuse knows no masters,” said Deputy Prosecutor Rick Damerville, his voice trembling with emotion as he alluded to abuse by his own father, himself tormented as a World War II prisoner of war, which led to post-traumatic stress disorder.

“There’s a lot of people who suffer from it, myself included. … These children’s cases are personal.”

Kema has agreed to lead police to his son’s remains in exchange for a manslaughter plea. He also admitted to recklessly causing his son’s death by repeated assaults and by failure to get him needed medical attention.

His wife, Jaylin, charged with murder, pleaded guilty to manslaughter in exchange for testifying against her husband, which in the end wasn’t necessary.

“It’s not over for me,” said police Capt. Randall Medeiros, who was a 28-year-old detective when he first started on the case of missing Peter “Peter Boy” Kema Jr. and now heads the Criminal Investigation Division. “I still want to find his remains. That to me is the last chapter.”

It’s wasn’t for lack of trying that the boy’s body was never found.

“We dug up an actual grave in a graveyard,” Medeiros recalled. Acting on a tip and a detailed description of the body’s location, police got a search warrant, notified the family of the deceased whose grave it was, and had a priest present.

“We did some digging, but nothing materialized,” he said. “We did not disturb any caskets (the location was specific). That’s just a fraction of the type of unusual things we had to go through.”

Early in the case, police excavated the Kema family’s yard in Nanawale.

“We dug up the entire backyard,” said Capt. Greg Esteban, who until recently was the lieutenant overseeing the area’s Criminal Investigative Section that ran the investigation.

Police, accompanied by a forensic team, used heavy equipment and, when spotting something unusual, used hand tools. “It was a challenging excavation because there was previously discarded debris,” said Esteban, who started on the case as a detective.

Acting on a tip in 2016, police and Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command personnel, including a forensic archaeologist, armed with a search warrant, looked for remains at a North Kona house, but came away empty-handed.

Just about every detective on the force has his imprint on this case, Esteban said. Medeiros credits senior detective Glenn Nojiri for showing him the ropes. In the beginning, four to five detectives were focused on the case in order to follow every lead, even traveling to Oahu.

Peter Kema Sr., who had maintained his innocence these past 20 years, even invented a woman — Auntie Rose Makuakane — with whom he claimed to have left his son while searching for work in Honolulu.

That lead was excluded by interviewing family members, Esteban said.

“At that time there were so many unanswered questions,” he said. “Now we know it was just a ruse, and they knew all along Peter Boy is no longer with us.”

As recently as two years ago, police received a tip about a young man on the East Coast who somewhat resembled an age-progression image of Peter Boy, Esteban said. East Coast authorities assisted Hawaii County police, who excluded that lead.

“This kid’s story went nationwide,” he said. “It’s not too often that a case in the small island of Hawaii gains national attention.”

Esteban said that friends and law enforcement partners, including the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children, have sent congratulatory emails on the job done.

“It’s a feel-good thing, but mixed feelings because of how this played out.”

Medeiros said when he first met Peter Kema several years ago during a follow-up investigation, his demeanor was “very erratic.”

“I was puzzled by his behavior,” he said. “He was calm one minute and then very excitable the next.”

Medeiros next saw him on April 28. It was the same day a grand jury indicted him on a charge of second-degree murder.

Police arrested Kema, who was working in Hilo as a boat builder, at 3 p.m. on unrelated traffic violations.

At 5:31 p.m., Medeiros accompanied a detective to his cell to arrest him on the murder charge.

Kema’s reaction?

“Disbelief,” he said.

“My initial impression was perhaps this whole situation has been eating him up inside,” he said. “When he was arrested he was pretty thin.”

But at Wednesday’s hearing — after a year in jail — “he looked like he put on quite a bit of weight,” Medeiros said. “I don’t know if it’s better living conditions with more food or that he’s gotten it off his chest.”

“Jaylin didn’t seem very surprised” when she was arrested while sitting in a car in front of her workplace in Hilo, he said. “I think she knew for years this was inevitable.”

But in all their conversations, Medeiros said, she never revealed her motive for staying silent.

Another indelible memory for Medeiros was his interview in Washington state with Chauntelle Woods and Allan Acol, Jaylin Kema’s children by another man.

The two, still children at the time, had moved there with their biological father, and had seemed relaxed as compared to when they were in Hawaii, he noted.

Peter Kema Sr. had one other biological child with Jaylin, Lina Acol.

Working daily on the case hit close to home with Medeiros, whose son was about the same age as Peter Boy.

“After that, you go home. Hard to be angry at my son for doing things,” he said. “Just pat him on the head. Think about what this guy did. Tough.”

Medeiros said the case brought attention to the need to report child abuse cases. “I think years back, that was a byproduct of the coverage of the disappearance of Peter Boy. That and other cases around the state continue to shine the light on the importance of reporting suspected child abuse.

“We all have a responsibility to say something to police, Child Welfare Services,” Medeiros said. “If it’s nothing, it’s nothing. If it’s brought to our attention, it needs to be addressed. …We need to continue to aggressively investigate reports of child abuse.”

Damerville said: “I’m not saying Mr. Kema is an awful person. I’m just saying a lot of people have demons of their own and bad things can happen.”

Peter Boy was just months old when he and his siblings were taken from his parents, and they did not get him back for nearly four years, he said.

Dragging out the reuniting of families can turn out badly, he said. “If you’re thinking, ‘If I take him to the doctor, I might not get him back,’” that can skew one’s thinking that you might be able to help him without taking him to the doctor, Damerville said.

Prosecutor Mitch Roth said it’s a difficult decision to put emphasis on an old, cold case when “we get about 20,000 cases a year.” And it has brought him a measure of criticism.

But he asks, “If it was your family how would you feel?”

Peter Boy’s grandfather, James Acol, “promised his wife on her deathbed he wouldn’t stop looking,” Roth said, adding he feels good he helped fulfill “that one dying wish.”

Despite not getting a murder conviction, Roth said he has no doubt the parole board will keep close to the full 20-year maximum sentence for manslaughter. In a recent case of a man who buried his wife in the backyard, the parole board gave him 19-1/2 years.

“I was the last person in the way of approving that deal,” he said. “I had to check my own humility and say, ‘It’s not about you. It’s about what the family wants.’”