Honolulu police are investigating a single-vehicle crash involving an off-duty detective, but his attorney contends he is being targeted for testifying in the grand jury probe of HPD Chief Louis Kealoha.
At about 4:40 a.m. Thursday on Lunalilo Home Road near Kaiser High School, a police-subsidized SUV veered off the road and onto the sidewalk before plowing into the side of a Hawaiian Electric Co. structure, knocking out power to more than 1,000 Hawaii Kai customers, according to HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu.
She said a 20-year HPD veteran assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division was involved in the collision, and his police powers have been restricted. He was off duty at the time.
No serious injuries were reported and no arrests have been made, she said.
HPD opened a criminal investigation into whether someone fled the scene of the crash and also an administrative investigation into the incident, Yu said.
WHEN asked whether the officer was driving the SUV, Yu said that was under investigation.
Hawaii Kai resident Jane Thompson, who saw the aftermath of the collision, said she heard the crash and went outside, where she saw police and firefighters inspecting the building that housed the HECO equipment, trying to determine how to get in. Then a lone man opened the building’s door from the inside, walked out and said, “I’m OK.”
Thompson said she assumed the man who emerged was the driver.
Megan Kau, the detective’s defense attorney, said that contrary to media reports, her client never told police he was not driving. She said he was confused about what happened after the crash.
Kau said she has never seen such a large amount of resources being used to investigate a vehicle collision. She said a police detective obtained a search warrant from a judge in the middle of the night to collect DNA evidence from her client and to search his SUV.
“We believe that the way that this case has been handled from the beginning is retaliation,” she said. “They want him to be fired so that his credibility is shot when he testifies against them.”
She said the police retaliation stems from her client being a witness for more than a year against Kealoha and his wife, Katherine, in a federal probe looking into potential abuse of authority by the chief.
After Thursday’s crash, police took the SUV into custody from the tow yard and kept it locked up until the search warrant was executed Friday night, Kau said.
The Kealohas could not be reached late Monday night.
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Correction: Jane Thompson says she assumed the man who emerged from the Hawaiian Electric structure near Lunalilo Home Road was the driver of the SUV that had crashed into the building Thursday. But Thompson says she did not see the accident, only its aftermath, so could not be certain, and she also did not know that the man was a police officer. An earlier version of this story and in Tuesday’s print edition reported that she “maintains the officer was driving” the SUV.
