All heads in the jury box turned to defendant Eric Thompson, on trial for a second time in the murder of his wife’s ex-lover, when video surveillance footage was shown of the prime suspect in the case walking near the victim’s Waipahu acupuncture clinic.
Deputy Prosecutor Benjamin Rose, who showed jurors the video near the end of the evidence portion of his case, said in his opening statement the distinctive gait of the person in the video wearing a white Quiksilver bucket hat, gray windbreaker with long sleeves that covered his hands, sunglasses, face covering, dark pants and shirt, holding a paper bag, was that of Thompson.
The state concluded its case in chief last week with its final witness — Kaiminaauao Mead, the lead Honolulu Police Department detective in the Jan. 12, 2022, shooting death of Jon Tokuhara — taking the stand Thursday and Friday.
Thompson’s first trial in 2023 ended with jurors unable to reach a verdict.
Rose questioned Mead about the man in the bucket hat and other surveillance footage, as well as on DNA and other key pieces of evidence tying the state’s case together.
Jurors have had the better part of three weeks to observe Thompson’s gait, unshackled and apparently without the ankle monitor required during his house arrest, walking freely in and out of the courtroom.
But Mead shared an even stronger reason to suspect Thompson over other potential people of interest.
Mead said the person in the surveillance video had crossed Waipahu Depot Street toward Tokuhara’s office, possibly looking through the front glass doors and windows to see whether anyone else was inside the office, and walked around toward the rear entry of the business, although no video shows him enter or exit.
As the man later walked back across the street, the bucket hat fell off his head onto the roadway.
The hat, picked up by a homeless man, Vicente Tangonan, was recovered by police and tested for DNA evidence.
Defense attorney Nelson Goo raised suspicions Daryl Fujita, ex-boyfriend of Tokuhara’s girlfriend, Andrea Irimata, had motive to kill the victim. Tokuhara twice broke up Fujita’s relationship with Irimata, whose relationships with both men overlapped, according to Mead.
Goo questioned whether evidence was destroyed when Fujita purchased a new cellphone between his first and second interviews with Mead and his old cellphone was wiped clean of data.
Mead said he did not verify Fujita’s alibi that he had dinner with his parents the night of the shooting.
Goo named women allegedly scorned by Tokuhara, who may have had motive to kill him, but Mead said they were ruled out because the bucket hat suspect was not a woman.
Contrary to Goo’s suggestion the victim could have been robbed, Mead testified Tokuhara lacked defensive wounds and bruising that might have indicated a physical altercation. Instead, a backpack containing $4,000 was found under a desk.
Tokuhara was found dead by his mother, Lilly, the following morning on the floor of his office with four gunshot wounds to his face from a .22-caliber firearm.
Mead said the case was a whodunit. Tokuhara’s phone was analyzed and revealed 5,600 messages between him and “Little Squeeze Me,” an Instagram account later found to be the name of a business owned by Thompson’s wife, Joyce. He said they pointed police to Thompson as a suspect since the messages revealed he had discovered their affair.
Rose asked Mead when Fujita was no longer considered a person of interest by police. The detective said his status changed “when the DNA from the white bucket hat came back with DNA from Eric Thompson.”
Susan Arnett, part of Thompson’s original defense team, grilled HPD criminologist Michelle Amorin, who testified for several hours regarding the collection of DNA from the bucket hat; swabbings from Tokuhara’s office; cheek swabs from Thompson, Fujita and Tangonan; and testing.
Amorin’s testing did not result in any definitive results pointing to Thompson. The swabbings she took of the interior of the bucket hat turned up as a “no conclusion” result. Her report said, “Due to the complexity and limited genetic information, no conclusion will be made.”
She said she retracted her conclusions as to the interior side of the crown and the interior top of crown because they were sent to an outside company for a different type of testing.
Amorin testified she suggested in 2022 to Mead that the DNA data for the inside of the hat be sent to Cybergenetics for analysis since the Pittsburgh-based technology company used software with greater capabilities than HPD’s crime lab at the time.
She explained that because of the HPD lab’s methodology, she had to throw out DNA data that fell below a certain threshold.
Cybergenetics em- ployee Jennifer Hornyak-Bracamontes, an expert in forensic DNA analysis with a specialty in probabilistic genotyping, testified that Cybergenetics software TruAllele is able to analyze valuable DNA data that falls below that threshold.
Hornyak-Bracamontes said probabilistic genotyping uses DNA software, which is like a DNA calculator, rather than doing it by hand. Manual interpretation would draw a line in the DNA test results, and anything falling below a certain threshold would not be used.
Hairlike strands were not tested since HPD does not test the hair if it does not have a root, Amorin said, and she suggested Mead hold off testing the hair but never heard back from him.
Hornyak-Bracamontes testified TruAllele found “very strong support” of the likelihood that Eric Thompson was a contributor to the DNA in the hat — 16.4 trillion times more likely to be a contributor of DNA than two unknowns for the interior top of crown of the hat.
And it found for the interior side of crown of the hat that it was 199 million times more likely to be Thompson’s DNA if he, Tangonan and one unknown contributor were contributing DNA.
It found “very strong” and “strong support” that excluded Fujita as a contributor. His DNA was 654 billion times less likely to be from him from the side of crown and 4.82 billion times less likely from the top of crown if comparing Thompson, Tangonan and two other unknown contributors.
Arnett questioned Hornyak-Bracamontes on whether a different hypothesis might be reached with different ethnic groups and about mixed ethnicities. She replied that it could, since there is different shared DNA among different populations.
Hornyak-Bracamontes said the only four groups represented in its comparisons are Asian, African American, Hispanic and Caucasian, as per the National Institute of Standards and Technology.
Thompson’s brother testified that he and his three siblings are of one-eighth Scottish descent and the remainder Japanese and Okinawan.
The murder trial resumes Tuesday with further defense witnesses. Eric Thompson took the stand in his first trial, but Goo declined to say whether he will take the stand again.
Correction: Stippling — small burn marks caused by gunpowder hitting the skin that indicate a person was shot at close range — was not found on fatal shooting victim Jon Tokuhara. An earlier-version of this story said stippling was found.
