WAILUKU >> The identities of 35 of the 115 people on the official list of fatalities from the Aug. 8 wildfire that laid waste to Lahaina have now been released, including the first child.
The Maui Police Department on Thursday released eight names that include three generations of a single Lahaina family. Faaoso Tone, 70, and Maluifonua Tone, 73, their daughter Salote Tone, 39, and her 7-year-old son, Tony Takafua, died while attempting to flee from the flames, according to social media posts and news reports issued just days after the disaster. Their remains were found Aug. 10 in a burned car near their Kuhua Street home.
An Aug. 14 statement from the family read, “The magnitude of our grief is indescribable, and their memories will forever remain etched in our hearts.”
A GoFundMe fundraiser has been established to help other members of the Tanaka-Tone ohana cope with the aftermath of the fire and their own losses.
Although Takafua is the first child to be officially identified as a fire fatality, the family of Keyiro Fuentes, 14, earlier reported that his remains were found at their Lahaina home, although his name has yet to be released.
Also identified Thursday by MPD were Lahaina residents Todd Nakamura, 61; Bernard Portabes, 75; Bette Jo Dyckman, 73; and Rebecca Rans, 57, who was also known as Becky Wells.
More than two weeks after the deadly wildfire, family members continue to hold out hope that Linda Vaikeli, 69, somehow survived the inferno that consumed over 2,200 structures, most of them residences.
Her son, Jason Musgrove, flew in from Conroe, Texas, to join Vaikeli’s husband, Sione, in checking shelters, clinics and relief sites around Maui for any word of her whereabouts, even parsing videos and photos of the unfolding disaster for possible sightings.
Vaikeli was home alone in her first-floor unit at the 112-unit Lahaina Surf apartments for low-income families when flames ripped through the town. Her husband had gone to Central Maui for a late-morning medical appointment but was unable to return home in the afternoon due to road closures, according to Vaikeli’s niece, Mandy Haney, also of Conroe, Texas.
“He’s beating himself up, wishing she would have come with him,” she said Thursday. “Nobody knew that was going to happen, but he’s got survivor’s guilt.”
The two had met about 25 to 30 years ago when Vaikeli was vacationing on Maui, and about a month later she packed up and moved to Lahaina. Vaikeli suffered from medical conditions that made it hard for her to walk, and she used a cane or walker to get around, Haney said. Sione worked three jobs to support the couple.
“She was more of a homebody, but when she did get out she liked to talk,” Haney said. “I mean, she could talk forever.”
Whenever family members start to get discouraged, she said they sometimes joke that Vaikeli is probably in a shelter somewhere “talking somebody’s face off.”
“She loved to talk. She loved to meet people. She would to talk to tourists for so long on Front Street that we’d finally have to tell her, ‘Aunt Linda, let’s go.’”
Haney said Vaikeli also was a skilled baker and had another son and two grandchildren.
Haney’s own mother, Marie Kuhl, 65, lost her home in the fire. Kuhl worked at Fleetwood’s on Front St. and was in Alaska at the time.
The family of Antonia “Toni” Molina, 64, whose name was released Tuesday, said she was working at the Tommy Bahama Marlin Bar at the Outlets of Maui retail complex on Front Street on Aug. 8 when the power went out. She decided to return to her home on Pauoa Street off Lahainaluna Road, near the Pioneer Mill smokestack, and soon afterward several relatives came by and advised her to evacuate, according to her cousin Rose Marie Arcangel.
Molina told them she was going to first pick up the leaves in her yard and bring whatever needed to be taken from her car into the house and put away.
“She was just one of those people — ‘I gotta clean up before I go anywhere,’” Arcangel explained Thursday.
Molina’s nephew drove up and told her, “Auntie, let’s go, it’s getting hot.” She stopped traffic on her street so he could back out from her driveway and leave, with Molina to follow in her own car.
“She said, ‘Yes, yes, I’m coming,’ but after that we don’t know what happened to her,” Arcangel said.
Molina’s remains were found on her property.
Arcangel said her cousin, who never married, worked for many years at the Marriott’s Maui Ocean Club and was a devoted member of the First Assembly of God church.
“She was very quiet, a very stern kind of person where she needs to get it done,” she said.
Also among those named earlier this week was Douglas Gloege, 59, whose remains were found along with those of his partner, Becky Wells, behind a Subway restaurant building just a few blocks from their home on Paeohi Street, mauka of Honoapiilani Highway.
Jon Gloege, 39, of Mesa, Ariz., said Thursday that his father, originally from San Diego, lived on Maui for about 20 years, working construction jobs. He last saw him in April 2022 for his grandmother’s funeral on Maui.
The younger Gloege said his parents were still friends and that his mother and half brother lived in his grandmother’s house on Kale Street just around the corner from where his father and Wells lived. From what he’s been able to gather, his father drove by the Kale Street home as the flames approached to make sure they were OK before circling back to get Wells.
His mother and half brother made it out safely, but he’s still uncertain how his father and Wells ended up where they were found.
LIST OF VICTIMS
For a complete list of those who died in the Lahaina wildfire, visit:
808ne.ws/3QNOCIv