David Shapiro: Brutal death of Hilo couple wrenches a community’s soul

News of incomprehensible violence driven by psychopathic grievance has become so commonplace in our country that we’re almost numb to it.

Until it hits close to home, as it did in Hilo last week with the stabbing deaths of Jeffrey and Carla Takamine, allegedly at the hand of their 21-year-old grandson, who was reported to be afflicted by schizophrenia.

The Takamines, both 68, were pillars of the community as owners of the cookie and confectionery company Big Island Delights and admired for their generous natures.

David Shiigi, a neighbor near their Panaewa home where the Takamines lived with multiple generations of their family, described them as “the type of people, when you think about them, there’s only good feelings.”

I had only one brief encounter with them 25 years ago, but it was memorable enough that I wrote about it at the time and thought about them over the years as I munched their cornflake cookies.

It was a rainy Hilo night in 1998 when my wife, Maggie, and I, on island visiting family, stopped in their shop on Kanoelehua Avenue to buy a cookie basket for our young grandson.

They were closing up and tired from a day that had begun 15 hours earlier, but they welcomed us with good cheer.

I described them as “part of a burst of entrepreneurship that is making Hilo the cookie capital of the Pacific,” which I found a fitting successor to the disappeared sugar industry that long dominated the island’s economy.

To me the most delightful thing about Big Island Delights, which had opened two years earlier, was the Takamines themselves.

Jeff manned the ice cream counter like a friendly bartender, feeding me samples until we came up with just the right refreshing flavor for a rainy, muggy night.

Carla guided Maggie around the store picking the most perfect items to include in a gift basket for a 2-year-old, while dispensing “savvy wisdom about family values.”

I described Carla as a “tiny woman with the pixie moccasins” who “looks the part of a cookie maker just as Santa Claus looks the part of a guy who gives toys to kids … she’s a human embodiment of everything a cookie stands for.”

The couple was forward-looking and hopeful. “We don’t expect to have to work from 9 a.m. to midnight forever,” she said. “We have a plan.”

From all appearances, their sweat equity paid off and the plan went according to their dreams. They were soon selling their cookies and other local treats all over the island — and eventually the state and the continent. They built a thriving business to support their five kids and the family homestead to keep them together. They enjoyed wide respect in the community.

Which is why it’s so hard to fathom how the exemplary lives of Jeffrey and Carla Takamine came to such a hideous and heartbreaking end.

It feels like the violent ugliness that has overtaken our country and communities in the new century has reached Mister Rogers’ neighborhood.

Reach David Shapiro at volcanicash@gmail.com.