19-year-old Erik Willis found guilty in Kahala Beach stabbing

An Oahu Circuit Court jury on Thursday found a 19-year-old Niu Valley man guilty of second-degree attempted murder in the July 8, 2020, stabbing of a 17-year-old girl on Kahala Beach.

Erik Willis, who was 18 when he turned himself in to police, faces life imprisonment with the possibility of parole when he is sentenced July 14. He remains in custody at the Oahu Community Correctional Center.

Willis, wearing a light aqua dress shirt and black pants, stood still as the verdict was read. His once-mop of curly hair was longer and neatly pulled back, and he appeared slimmer than at the time of his arrest.

During the trial, the jury heard Melia Kalahiki, who was stabbed 15 times, testify that she recognized Willis in court from his eyes, eyebrows and complexion, despite his wearing a mask over his nose and mouth.

Kalahiki, who frequented Kahala Beach, said she was lying on her stomach the afternoon of July 8 when a man she didn’t know but had seen a few times before was walking along the beach between her and the water. He sat down about 10 feet away from her, according to court documents, then jumped on her back, covered her mouth and stabbed her neck five times.

She also received other stab wounds to her right shoulder, neck and hands. A trauma surgeon said she had tracheal injuries and suffered significant blood loss, according to court documents.

Deputy Prosecutor Lawrence Sousie declined to comment on the verdict, except to say, “The jury has spoken.”

Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm said in a news release that his department “is very pleased with the verdict and hopes that it brings some measure of comfort to the brave victim and her family.”

“This verdict means that the public will be protected from Willis’ violent and dangerous conduct for many years to come,” Alm said. “We thank the jury for its service as well as HPD for diligently investigating this matter.”

Prosecutors said in July 2020 that DNA from two of three blood stains on Willis’ right shoe matched the victim’s DNA.

However, prosecutors were not allowed to present that evidence in court because the judge had suppressed it during a 2021 hearing on the matter.

Eric Seitz, Willis’ defense attorney, said after the verdict that he was prepared to call an expert witness to throw doubt on the Honolulu Police Department’s evidence methodology, and questioned how, if Kalahiki was bleeding so much, police found only one drop of blood on his shoe.

“That is suspect,” he said.

Seitz also said he is “disgusted by the kind of hysteria that exists in this community about crime and the way it plays out in these kinds of trials.”

“Erik Willis gets convicted in a case where the evidence was absolutely insufficient to convict anybody,” Seitz said, adding that he plans to appeal the guilty verdict.

Court documents said an HPD criminalist confirmed that two of three blood stains on Willis’ right shoe were human and that DNA from the blood matched Kalahiki’s.

Seitz claimed that jurors disregarded evidence that someone else could have committed the crime.

“She didn’t deserve what she got by any means,” he said. “Nobody deserves the kind of serious, horrendous attack which she sustained. But her ability to identify her attacker was absolutely unquestionably in doubt.”

He pointed out that hospital records indicated Kalahiki had drugs in her system at the time of the attack and that she failed to identify Willis shortly after the stabbing, identifying him only in court when it was obvious he was the man suspected in the attack, raising questions “about the validity of her identification.”

Seitz said she was in severe shock and only glimpsed her attacker.

Due to her neck injuries, she was unable to immediately talk to police and could only signal using her feet and by blinking.

Court documents show a female who witnessed the attack described the assailant to police as a man with curly, dark hair who was Asian-Caucasian and who resembled Willis, whom she had seen before. Although she did not directly see the attack because her view was obscured by bushes, she did see a man’s head come up from behind the bushes. The man fled and the victim came toward her holding her blood- covered neck.

The prosecution also presented time-stamped surveillance videos from near Willis’ home in Niu Valley, near the scene of the stabbing in Kahala and from a bus showing him wearing a clean T-shirt on his way to Kahala and a dirty T-shirt on his way home.