2 Maui men found guilty of federal hate crime

A jury Thursday found two Native Hawaiian men guilty of a federal hate crime, eight years after they beat up a white man who bought a house in their remote village on Maui.

U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright ordered the detention of Levi Aki Jr. and Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi until their sentencing, scheduled for March 2. Both men had been charged with a hate crime count and are facing up to 10 years in prison.

As they were escorted from the court in handcuffs, about a dozen family members cried and said goodbye. “Love you, brah,” a man said. “Mama loves you,” a woman said as the toddler in her arms said, “Bye, Daddy.”

“My life is on the line,” Aki said in an interview with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser before the verdict was delivered. “I stayed out of trouble since then. I’m a big teddy bear,” he said. “I have faith that everything will work out for the better.”

The charges stemmed from a 2014 incident in which Alo-Kaonohi and Aki assaulted Christopher Kunzelman, a white man from Arizona who had purchased a foreclosed house in their home village of Kahakuloa. The state charged both men with assault, foregoing hate crime charges. They pleaded no contest, Alo-Kaonohi to felony assault and Aki to terroristic threatening. And after plea agreements in 2019, the two were sentenced to four years of probation.

The federal charges, brought seven years after the attack, alleged it was racially motivated. On Thursday afternoon the multiracial jury unanimously agreed that both men attacked Kunzelman because of the color of his skin. The men had pleaded not guilty on Jan. 19, 2021. (Originally scheduled for March 2021, the trial was delayed multiples times due to concerns related to COVID-­ 19.) Defense attorneys for Alo-Kaonohi and Aki argued that the men were motivated not by racial animus, but because of Kunzelman’s sense of entitlement and disrespect.

The attack occurred in February 2014 in Kahakuloa, a rural neighborhood that’s a 45-minute drive down a narrow, twisting road northwest of Kahului. Kunzelman bought a house on the bay there, sight unseen, for $175,000. He said that a Hawaiian woman appeared in his dreams, asking for help in her garden and convincing him to buy the property.

He arrived to find a locked gate blocking access to a road leading to the property, so he cut the lock and drove down what he insisted was a legal easement, Salina Kanai, defense attorney for Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi, wrote in a brief.

Alo-Kaonohi and Aki believed Kunzelman was trespassing on their private road without easement rights, Kanai wrote. She declined to comment Thursday afternoon. Lynn Panagakos, who represented Aki, did not respond to a request for comment.

Video cameras that Kunzelman mounted on his Land Rover captured portions of the incident when the defendants approached Kunzelman, but the assault upstairs on the lanai of the home is out of frame. At least six times in the video, they said they were upset that Kunzelman cut the locks.

Federal prosecutors alleged that Aki gave a shovel to Alo-Kaonohi, who hit Kunzelman in the head with it. Aki himself then struck Kunzelman with the shovel, punched and head-butted him, leaving him unconscious, then proceeded to kick him repeatedly in the ribs, prosecutors alleged.

Kunzelman was diagnosed at a hospital with a concussion, head trauma and broken ribs. He could not be reached for comment.

Hate crime charges can carry a higher penalty than assault but require prosecutors to show not just what happened, but why.

Two out-of-state prosecutors experienced with civil rights and hate crime cases, Tara Allison and Christopher Perras, joined Hawaii-based Assistant U.S. Attorney Chris Thomas on the case. Allison successfully prosecuted the four former Minneapolis police officers involved in the 2020 death of George Floyd in a federal civil rights case. Perras worked on the hate crime prosecution of three men who killed Ahmaud Arbery in Georgia in 2020 and were found guilty in February.

The prosecutors alleged that the defendants called Kunzelman a “(expletive) haole” and “whitey”; said he was “too (expletive) white” and “the wrong (expletive) color”; and that no “white man” could ever live there. In the video recording, the only clear utterance of the word “haole” was when Aki said to Kunzelman, “Use your (expletive) head. You’s a haole, eh? You supposed to have (expletive) brains, eh?”

A small number of white residents live in Kahakuloa, and one of them spoke to the Star-Advertiser in August on the condition that his name be withheld. “I cross 13 pieces of property to get to mine, and I made sure every one of the local families are good with it before we put our road in here, and that was 40 years ago,” he said.

The prosecutors did not respond to a request for comment.

“The jury’s verdict confirms that the rule of law serves to protect all persons in our community from vicious assaults, no matter the color of their skin,” U.S. Attorney Clare E. Connors said in a news release. “When people commit violent crimes against someone out of hatred for the victim’s race, the Department of Justice will ensure they face criminal consequences in a court of law.”

“This case highlights our work to ensure everyone feels safe in their own community without any fear of retribution or violence regardless of their race,” FBI Special Agent in Charge Steven Merrill said in the release.