March 6th 2023.
A vile offense has cast a spotlight on the racial divide in paradise. The New York Post reported that two men from Hawaii were charged with a federal hate crime for their vicious assault on a white man who tried to relocate to Kahakuloa - a secluded area in Maui. Kaulana Alo-Kaonohi and Levi Aki Jr. are said to have attacked Christopher Kunzelman because of his race. The two assailants reportedly punched, kicked, and hit Kunzelman with a shovel in 2014.
Alo-Kaonohi was handed a sentence of 78 months while Aki was sentenced to 50 months. Kristin Clarke, Assistant Attorney General of the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division, declared that the men had
wounded Kunzelman simply because he wasn't like them. “The defendants in this case nearly killed a man because they believed he did not belong in their neighborhood because of the color of his skin,” Clarke stated. “The law safeguards everybody in this country from racially motivated violence, and these sentences send a powerful message that such violence will not be tolerated.”
This hate crime has been distinguished from other hate crimes that have been highlighted in the recent past since it shows how native Hawaiians are determined to prevent their culture from being wiped out and how people who come to Hawaii don't take into account its history and racial ideologies.
The victim's wife said that the couple had a strong love for Maui and bought a house for $175,000 to repair after she was diagnosed with multiple sclerosis. Once the repairs began, Lori Kunzelman said her husband was threatened and harassed.
The defense attorneys for the assailants asserted that race wasn't a factor in this case, but that the victim's sense of entitlement and disrespectful attitude were. Kunzelman's wife asserted that this was not the case. “It was obviously a hate crime from the very beginning,” she said. “The entire time they’re saying things like, ‘You have the wrong skin color. No ‘haole’ is ever going to live in our neighborhood.'”
Videos from the victim's house showed Aki saying “You’s a haole, eh,” which Kunzelman testified was spoken in a derogative way. Field experts claimed the term implies a person who is
behaving as if they have the right to own the place.
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