The first installment of Lillian Koller’s planned four-part book series on the tortured life and death of Peter “Peter Boy” Kema Jr. details the horrific parental abuse he endured and the failures by the state child welfare system entrusted to protect him.
Koller, a former state Department of Human Services director, says she feared the details from the case would likely remain buried and the lessons forgotten, even more so after both parents recently took plea deals and will not face a public criminal trial.
Her 324-page first part of the self-published e-book, “Peter Boy: Hawaii’s Most Notorious Case of Child Abuse and Murder,” relies heavily on the roughly 2,000 pages of confidential DHS Child Welfare Services documents on the Kema case that Koller publicly released as the department’s director in 2005.
Help from public
As the book title suggests, the story of the 6-year-old Big Island boy is well known to Hawaii residents, starting with his disappearance in 1997. A year later his parents appealed for help from the public, saying they had lost track of him after giving him over to an “auntie” on Oahu.
“It does affect me very much when I look at the extent to which so many good people earnestly tried to find Peter Boy alive,” Koller told the Honolulu Star-Advertiser. “The parents were standing up at a news conference holding a rendering of Auntie Rose Makuakane. ‘Please help us find Peter Boy.’ It just turns my stomach when you look at that and realize how disturbed they were and how they could disassociate from reality to pull that off.”
Plea deals made
The missing-person case was reclassified as murder in 2000. But despite a long, documented history of abuse in the Kema household, prosecution was a problem with no body and the need to rely on young witnesses — his siblings.
The mystery of “Where’s Peter Boy?” took a dramatic turn 20 years later when Peter Kema Sr. last month admitted to killing his son in 1997 and disposing of his body in a remote area of the Big Island. His admission was part of a deal to plead guilty to a reduced charge of manslaughter.
Hilo prosecutors had reopened the case in 2014, and by April 2016 both parents were charged with murder. Last month’s guilty plea by the father was made possible after his wife, Jaylin Kema, pleaded guilty in December to manslaughter and agreed to testify against her husband in exchange for a reduced sentence. Sentencing is scheduled for June 9 for Peter Kema Sr. and for June 13 for Jaylin Kema.
Koller said it is difficult to synthesize and understand what happened in the years before and after Peter Boy’s death from the official records and internal documents. So, she said, she took the time to digest the voluminous records and provide them in an easier format so people can understand how horrific the abuse was and to prevent this kind of situation from happening again.
“There are children needlessly suffering and dying,” she said. “This isn’t just in Hawaii. This is everywhere.”
The child welfare documents detailed the extensive history of child abuse and neglect that the Kema children suffered at the hands of their parents.
After Peter Boy’s birth on May 1, 1991, he was medevaced with a respiratory problem from Hilo to Honolulu, where he was hospitalized for two weeks.
Meanwhile, his grandmother Yolanda Acol discovered half brother Allan, 4, and half sister Chauntelle, 2, with bruises and cuts on their faces and reported it to CWS and police.
Even though a CWS worker pinpointed his father as the abuser, CWS allowed the medically fragile infant, who needed constant monitoring, to be released to his parents, Koller said. By the time he was 3 months old, Peter Boy had multiple broken bones, which were determined to be from abuse.
Near his end, and a month before his sixth birthday, a 15-year-old cousin told her therapist that Kema broke Peter Boy’s arm and forced him to eat dog feces, and that the family was planning to move from Nanawale to Hilo.
The therapist reported the abuse April 4, 1997, but CWS and police didn’t start investigating until June 1997. By then it was too late. Peter Boy’s death, prosecutors say, likely occurred from septic shock due to a large festering wound in his arm.
“CPS had been bamboozled by the parents, thinking the Acols (maternal grandparents James and Yolanda) were just trying to meddle too much,” Koller said. “That’s why they minimized the injuries.” One worker was “suckered into believing what Jaylin and Peter say” — that the Acols were trying to control and decide how to raise the kids, she said.
Targeted abuse
Koller blames the system and those within that system who failed Peter Boy, including a Family Court judge, CWS social workers who allowed him to be returned to his abusive parents, and a court-appointed psychologist who pushed family reunification first. She said the judge failed to review the records and relied on social workers’ recommendations.
But why did Peter Boy get the brunt of the abuse from Peter Kema Sr.?
Koller said the records show that “why he targeted Peter Boy was because he didn’t believe he was his biological child. He thinks it was William Collier,” the father of Jaylin Kema’s two older children. “The rages and beatings co-occurred with him being drunk,” she added.
Private investigator Steve Lane, who has been appointed by the court to represent Peter Boy’s siblings’ interests as special master to determine whether grounds exist to sue the state for damages, also featured newborn Peter Boy’s illness in a report to Family Court.
He was given access to the DHS documents, which were resealed in 2011 by Koller’s successor and no longer accessible to the public. Lane wrote that if CWS had followed its own standards and protocols and acted on the therapist’s complaint, Peter Boy would have been alive today.
He concluded in his April 12 report that the siblings and the estate have claims against the state DHS’ Child Welfare Services.
Koller said, “You can understand … how frustrating it was when relatives stepped up and reported to CPS (Child Protective Services) and police, trying to get a different outcome than what happened, and they were ignored. It was like blind devotion to this notion that family reunification is the best outcome for all children in all circumstances, and that’s just preposterous.”
