An amended federal
civil complaint alleges nine Honolulu police officers beat a 25-year-old man after knowing he wasn’t the prime suspect in a Jan. 1, 2024, pursuit and gunfight with an attempted murder suspect.
Five Honolulu police officers were not charged by Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm for using force on Tevita Cadiente, who they found running toward a police shootout with an attempted murder suspect who shot two officers.
Cadiente suffered a facial fracture, a traumatic subconjunctival hemorrhage, a concussion, orthopedic knee injuries, cognitive impairment including memory loss and confusion, and
vision loss.
His knee was injured when it was hit by a police van, and the injuries to his face were caused when an officer pulled him to the ground face-first.
Cadiente knew Sidney
Tafokitau, a 44-year-old attempted murder suspect who shot his ex-girlfriend with an AR-15 assault rifle on Jan. 1, 2024, before leading officers on a daylong, islandwide manhunt while shooting at them.
The roughly 100-mile chase involved about 62
police officers and one of HPD’s MD 500E helicopters.
Tafokitau shot and wounded two officers on University Avenue before he was shot 23 times by police. He died at the scene. Alm decided in December the officers were justified to use deadly force.
Amid the chaos, Cadiente was intercepted by police as he ran toward where Tafokitau confronted officers for the final time. Cadiente and Tafokitau are both tall, Polynesian males with facial hair who were wearing similar patterned shorts.
Cadiente allegedly knew Tafokitau, whom he called “Pepe” from “the clubs.”
Cadiente was aware Tafokitau was being chased by
police and “ran out to record it,” according to the police investigation of the alleged beating.
Cadiente admitted to
having Tafokitau’s name and number in his cellphone under the name “Nuketown.” Police found no evidence that Cadiente was helping Tafokitau.
Alm said in January that responding Honolulu police officers believed that Tevita Cadiente was Tafokitau.
In a Jan. 31 news conference, Alm noted that five
officers involved in the Cadiente incident would not be charged criminally.
Those officers are Patrick Sung, Douglas Lee, Christopher Chu, Ryan Domingo and Hubert Louiz Barboza. Those officers, plus four more, are named in the federal civil complaint.
HPD officers Darren Lee Soto, Joseph Pagan, Masakazu Kurita and John Otto were not part of the prosecuting attorney’s investigation into the Cadiente incident, but are named in the civil suit.
The amended complaint, filed Tuesday, refers to discovered police body cam footage, allegedly showing multiple “police officers stomping Mr. Cadiente in the face, resulting in several facial lacerations, a fractured nose, and other severe injuries,” Cadiente’s attorney, Michael D. Rudy, told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser.
About 1-1/2 minutes after Tafokitau was shot dead, at least one police officer is
audibly heard stating, “I don’t think this is our man,” according to the amended complaint.
“We do not comment on ongoing litigation,” read a statement to the Star-Advertiser from the city
Department of the Corporation Counsel.
According to the time stamp on the body-worn camera footage secured by Cadiente’s attorneys, he
was hit with a van and allegedly beaten by police from “4:15:42 to at least 4:16:50 p.m.,” according to the amended complaint. An ambulance arrived at the scene at 4:21:50 and attended to Cadiente at 4:22:00.
About 20 seconds after Cadiente was hit with the unmarked police van, the radio dispatch operator gave the first time-specific location of University Avenue and Dole Street for the “officer down” as a result of being shot by Tafokitau.
Ten seconds later the
radio dispatch operator stated, “It looks like suspect may be on foot,” according to the complaint.
Two of the HPD officers
allegedly signed statements, “which were used in the HPD criminal and internal affairs investigations that reviewed their conduct, stating that they had struck Mr. Cadiente with the police van only after receiving radio dispatch information that the suspect was running down University at the time they viewed Mr. Cadiente on the sidewalk.”
When the officers submitted their incident reports, “each knew that their
statements regarding the factors which led them to decide to strike Mr. Cadiente with the van based upon a prior radio dispatch describing a suspect running down University were totally false and untrue, as Mr. Cadiente had been taken down well prior to any notification of a location that a potential suspect was on the move, on foot, down University, just past Dole,” read the amended complaint.
Rudy asked that the police body-worn camera footage be made “immediately available to the public.”
City attorneys only recently received the request to release the footage and are still analyzing the
matter.
