A federal jury found the company that was involved in a deadly fireworks explosion in Waikele and its top manager not guilty Tuesday of permit violations involving the fireworks.
Five employees of Donaldson Enterprises Inc. were working inside a former Navy munitions bunker on April 8, 2011, when some of the fireworks they were dismantling and treating for disposal exploded.
Robert Kevin Freeman, Justin Joseph Kelii, Robert Leahey and Neil Benjamin Sprankle died in the bunker. Bryan Cabalce survived the blast but died later at a hospital.
After four weeks of testimony, the jury deliberated less than two full days before finding the company and its director of operations, Charles Donaldson, not guilty of treating and storing hazardous waste without a permit.
“The jury has spoken. We respect its verdicts,” said Marc Wallenstein, one of two assistant U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the case.
Donaldson’s lawyer, Thomas Otake, said the explosion was a tragedy but an accident and that there should never have been a criminal prosecution.
“It was an exercise into trying to shift blame away from governmental agencies that dropped the ball,” he said.
DEI and Donaldson went on trial last month on felony charges of storing and treating hazardous waste without a permit, conspiring to treat and store hazardous waste without a permit, and lying about having completely disposed of a particular batch of seized fireworks.
Investigators deemed the explosion an accident. No one was charged with any crimes in connection with it.
After prosecutors rested their case, Senior U.S. District Judge Susan Oki Mollway determined that they did not present enough evidence about the lying charge to the jury to support it and dismissed the charge. Prosecutors also at that point dropped the conspiracy charge after not presenting testimony from anyone with whom Donaldson could have conspired.
Carlton Finley, former DEI project manager, had been charged with the same crimes as Donaldson and the company but, in a deal with the prosecutor, pleaded guilty a month before the trial to a single misdemeanor count of improperly storing a particular batch of explosive material that survived the 2011 explosion.
Prosecutors did not call him to testify in the trial. Finley faces maximum penalties of a year in jail and a $100,000 fine at sentencing next month.
The fireworks that were in the bunker were seized as illegal by the U.S. Department of Homeland Security. DEI was the government subcontractor tasked with storing the fireworks during the prosecution of those who were accused of importing them. The fireworks became hazardous waste only when the government ordered them destroyed at the conclusion of the prosecution.
“DEI was a very good, small Hawaii company that did a lot of tough jobs that nobody else really wanted to do,” said Randall Hironaka, the company’s lawyer in the criminal trial.
Donaldson testified that when he contacted the state Department of Health’s Hazardous Waste Section, the agency responsible for enforcing federal hazardous waste laws, he was granted a permit only to treat the fireworks even though he stated he would also be storing them during the disposal process. DEI burned the fireworks at the city’s Koko Head Shooting Complex after soaking them in diesel fuel.
By the time the 90-day permit expired, the rules had changed, requiring the landowner to obtain the permit. Donaldson said he then had the fireworks burned, without a permit, at a Schofield Barracks firing range at the direction of a Hazardous Waste Section employee.
