A weekend shooting at a Maili cockfight — leaving two dead and three injured — underscores the dire shortage of police officers on the Waianae Coast and possibly the need for legislation to facilitate arrests and prosecution of those involved in cockfighting, a community leader said.

Honolulu police continued to search Sunday for the shooter: a “local male” in his 20s, considered armed and dangerous. Homicide Lt. Deena Thoemmes said a fight broke out around midnight Friday among a group of males at the end of the cockfight, shots were fired and the five victims, who were nearby, were struck.

Meanwhile, the father of one of the people killed, a 34-year-old man, confirmed Sunday the identity of his son as Gary Rabellizsa. The father would not identify the other person who was killed, a 59-year-old woman. He asked for privacy. The Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office said it had no information on the people who were fatally shot.

Police said the other victims are three men, ages 40, 57 and 38. Their names and the name of the woman who was killed were not released.

According to a neighbor, the 59-year-old woman also lived at the Rabellizsa home, located within walking distance of the property where the cockfighting occurred in the 87-100 block of Kaukamana Road in a rural area with a mix of homes, farms and what appears to be unused land. The neighbor declined to give his name Sunday.

Nanakuli-Maili Neighborhood Board member Patty Kahanamoku-Teruya expressed condolences Sunday and said she hopes the community will be able to move forward and begin to heal.

She said cockfighting started long before the illegal gambling houses that have begun to plague the Waianae Coast.

But like those illegal gambling establishments in homes and businesses, they are hidden from sight in the rural back roads, where “nobody pays attention to them,” but others are visible, such as those on Hakimo Road, Kahanamoku- Teruya said.

And just as with the gambling houses, cockfighting comes with a myriad of activities that “come into our community as a result,” including “drug distribution, prostitution, trafficking,” confrontational fights over money, and anger, which leads to violence, Kahanamoku-Teruya said.

“A lot of our community members won’t talk to you,” she said. “They cower, they live in fear because of the retaliation.”

She said there is no monitoring of the situation, no enforcement. “We all know what’s going on. We continue to feel neglected and forgotten.”

The Honolulu Police Department has told the neighborhood board that it’s difficult to control cockfighting, since officers need to see money exchanged or see actual cockfighting. “That’s why the activity continues.”

HPD says it had 374 total uniformed vacancies islandwide as of March 5. Citing safety reasons, HPD spokeswoman Michelle Yu would not say what the staffing shortage is for the Waianae Coast or the district it is in. The partially built Waianae police substation, which was dedicated in 2016 and so far has cost $16 million, sits mostly unused today with three officers working there.

Kahanamoku-Teruya said chicken fighting is an illegal activity, not a cultural one.

She said in Las Vegas, where gambling is legal, security at the casinos ensures people act cordially and prohibits undesirables from coming in, whereas the security at cockfights is watching out for police and warns participants of their arrival.

They often block streets, slow down traffic and question drivers in unfamiliar cars.

“Got to be really careful,” Kahanamoku-Teruya said. “People carry weapons. It’s getting worse.”

A neighbor, who asked not to be named because of concerns for his safety, said, “Everything is guns. Nobody knows how to fight with their hands anymore.”

He said he was sitting outside in his backyard when he heard the popping sounds. “People were running through my yard,” he said. Vehicles poured out of the two private dirt roads on either side of the property.

He said the cockfighting has been going on at the property for about a year now, with no previous incidents.

He said cockfighting goes on all over the neighborhood, and blames the shooting on “people who come in and start trouble.”

A neighboring farmer said that “at night it’s different.”

“You don’t really see the chicken fights,” he said, but bad things happen and “there’s hardly any police activity.”

In a statement released Sunday, animal welfare group Animal Wellness Action said it has predicted this “very sort of mass shooting at a cockfighting event because cockfighting is bound up with illegal gambling, money laundering, narcotics trafficking, and human-on-human violence.”

“It is not uncommon for cockfighters to bring children to these events and expose them to this blend of lawless behavior and animal cruelty.”

Wayne Pacelle, president of the group, said, “Hawaii’s state legislature and law enforcement have proved too timid and failed to address the problem of rampant and organized cockfighting on the islands and the trafficking of fighting birds to and from the state.”

The group runs an “End Cockfighting” campaign across the country and is advocating for legislation in Congress to address the “rampant cockfighting in Hawaii, Oklahoma, Alabama and other states,” the news release said.

Hawaii is one of only eight states with misdemeanor penalties for cockfighting.