Mahalo for supporting Honolulu Star-Advertiser. Enjoy this free story!
One way or another, the jury in the federal conspiracy trial of retired Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha and his wife, former deputy prosecutor Katherine Kealoha, will hear from the latter’s 99-year-old grandmother.
Jury selection is underway and U.S. District Chief Judge J. Michael Seabright has said he hopes to have jurors empaneled in time to hear opening statements and the start of evidence by Thursday.
The government plans to present testimony from Florence Puana, Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother, in an effort to establish the motive behind the alleged staged theft of the Kealohas’ mailbox in 2013.
Puana told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser on Wednesday that she wants to testify in front of the jury.
“I want to stop all the lying that’s going on,” Puana said.
But her health could prevent her from taking the witness stand.
Puana recently underwent heart surgery, and as a precaution, federal prosecutors arranged last month to have her answer questions under oath. The court will play her videotaped deposition for the jury in the event she is unable to testify in person.
Her doctor on Thursday did not clear Puana to testify and prosecutors filed documents on Friday asking the court to declare her unavailable.
Puana said the decision on whether she will testify in the trial is ultimately up to her.
Mailbox theft
Federal prosecutors say the Kealohas and the three former members of Honolulu Police Department’s elite Criminal Intelligence Unit on trial with them staged the theft of the mailbox and framed Katherine Kealoha’s uncle for it to discredit the man, who, along with Puana, was suing Kealoha over the proceeds of a reverse mortgage on Puana’s home.
Puana sold her home in order to pay back the mortgage and to have something to leave her children. She claims that her granddaughter duped her into getting a reverse mortgage on the false promise that Kealoha would use some of the proceeds to refinance some of her own debt and take over the mortgage.
In pretrial court filings, the government quotes from a letter to Puana in which Katherine Kealoha says she “WILL seek the highest form of legal retribution against ANYONE and EVERYONE who has written or verbally” accused her of taking the reverse-mortgage money, and, “They will rue the day that they decided to state these TWISTED LIES!”
Kealoha’s uncle, Gerard Puana, went on trial in U.S. District Court in 2014 for the mailbox theft. The judge declared a mistrial on the first day of evidence after Louis Kealoha presented improper testimony to the jury. The U.S. Attorney had the case dismissed and the FBI started an investigation that led to the charges the Kealohas, Lt. Derek Wayne Hahn, officer Minh-Hung “Bobby” Nguyen and retired Maj. Gordon Shiraishi are facing.
Florence Puana and her son Gerard filed a lawsuit against Katherine Kealoha that went to trial in state court in 2015. They lost and were ordered to pay for Kealoha’s attorney fees and cost. The case is on appeal.
Puana said she and her son lost the civil case because Kealoha and her witnesses lied. One of Kealoha’s witnesses was her own father, Rudolph Puana, one of Florence Puana’s nine children.
Grand jury indictment
A federal grand jury returned an indictment in 2017 against the Kealohas, Hahn, Nguyen and Shiraishi. Two months later Gerard Puana filed a federal civil lawsuit against the Kealohas, Nguyen and other former and current Honolulu police officers for violating his constitutional rights in connection with his arrest and prosecution for the mailbox theft. The lawsuit is on hold pending the outcome of the criminal case.
Florence Puana said Wednesday that the trial will not open old wounds because the wounds never healed.
“So many things that happened. Sometimes I try to forget about it but I can’t. It’s too much of a burden on everybody, not only me, my whole family,” she said.
Puana still gets emotional when talking about breaking her promise to her late husband to leave the family home to their children. She said the whole ordeal has brought her and her children, except for Rudolph, closer together.
“He did say he disowned my family. So if that’s the way he feels about it, I’m sorry, I still love him. Everybody else got closer,” she said.
83
