Three men, including two career criminals, were indicted by an Oahu grand jury Tuesday in connection with an April home invasion robbery and kidnapping in Tantalus.
The ordeal left two 21-year-old men feeling rattled after they were attacked and bound with their hands behind their backs.
"It was pretty scary," said one of the men who was struck with the butt of a shotgun. His housemate was hit in the head with a small sledgehammer and eventually passed out. Both of the victims requested anonymity because of the violent nature of the attack.
Joshua Hickox, Vilitonu Fonokalafi and Harold Waa were each indicted on three counts of first-degree robbery, two counts of kidnapping and one count of first-degree burglary. All three were being held at Oahu Community Correctional Center.
Hickox, 29, was being held in lieu of $250,000 bail, Fonokalafi in lieu of $100,000 bail and Waa, 30, in lieu of $50,000 bail.
Police requested bail amounts based on criminal records, the prosecutor’s office said. Hickox has 32 arrests and seven convictions, and he was on probation for second-degree theft at the time of robbery. Fonokalafi has 33 arrests and eight convictions. Waa has seven arrests but no convictions.
According to a court affidavit, the robbery occurred about 10 p.m. April 1 near the top of Tantalus Drive. Two men and a woman were home at the time, but the woman was asleep in a room and didn’t know about the robbery until after it ended.
One of the victims said the woman is his girlfriend and her family owns the gated, two-bedroom home at the bottom of a private driveway. He and the other man live in the home, which offers a sweeping view of Waikiki.
Both victims, who work at Hawaii Stage & Lighting Rentals, said they did not know their attackers.
The affidavit said three unknown men forced their way into the home, yelling "Honolulu police."
Fonokalafi struck one man in the face with a small sledgehammer, then Hickox kicked and punched the man and tied his hands behind his back with a plastic tie, the court document said.
Waa, who was carrying a shotgun, grabbed the second man and tied his hands behind his back with plastic ties. As Waa was leading the man to a hallway closet, the man’s restraints came off, and Waa struck him in the back with the shotgun butt, retied his hands with more zip ties and shoved him into the closet, where the man stayed until the robbers left about 90 minutes later, the victim said.
During that time, the assailants searched the house and ate food in the kitchen, said the man who had been in the closet.
The robbers even went through the woman’s purse in the room where she slept, the woman’s boyfriend said. Before he passed out, he pleaded for them to leave her alone.
The woman had been sleeping during the robbery and when she woke up, she didn’t know what happened and found her boyfriend unconscious and tied up on the floor in the living room.
The boyfriend said he was hit with the sledgehammer, which was about a foot and a half long. He said the assailant struck him as he was trying to get past the three men to reach his girlfriend in the bedroom.
"I would have never thought" this could have happened, he said. "Now I’m on a totally different page about locking every door, daytime or night," he said.
The man who had been in the closet said besides the gun, he saw the other men carrying knives. During the robbery, they would come back to the closet to ask him where the money was.
The men eventually fled in a victim’s Toyota 4Runner, which was found in Makiki about two hours later. The suspects got away with cash, credit cards, electronics, jewelry and other items, court documents said.
The man who had been in the closet ran to a neighbor’s for help when he heard the men drive off. He didn’t see his friend and thought he had been abducted by the men. Meanwhile, his friend woke up and thought the robbers kidnapped his housemate and fled.
Police nabbed at least one of the robbery suspects after a detective obtained video of someone using one of the victim’s stolen debit cards and recognized a woman in the video. The detective later linked a tip about a suspect and the woman, who is related to the suspect.
