A former Kamehameha Schools student, who was secretly recorded showering in a teacher’s faculty apartment, testified in state court Wednesday that he didn’t know his privacy had been violated until a month after school officials told students that the teacher was “leaving” the school.
Shane-Justin Nuuhiwa said police invited him to Honolulu Police Department headquarters where a detective showed him some video clips and asked him to identify the person in the video clips showering naked.
“I recognized that person to be me,” Nuuhiwa said.
That was in April 2013 when Nuuhiwa, now 24, was a Kamehameha Schools senior and a member of the school’s speech and debate team. He’s testifying as a prosecution witness in the trial of former speech teacher and debate team coach Gabriel Alisna, who is charged with five counts of invasion of privacy involving three male students.
Nuuhiwa said police showed him five video clips. He said three clips, each about five minutes long, show him showering. The other two are each less than five seconds long. Nuuhiwa said one shows Alisna appearing to adjust the camera, after it’s turned on. He said the other shows
Alisna moving the camera from the shower into a dark room.
Under cross examination from defense attorney Keith Shigetomi, Nuuhiwa said the two short videos do not show the whole face of the person who appears to be adjusting and moving the camera.
The videos were recorded by a camera hidden in a clothes hook. Police said they retrieved 14 videos from the camera’s memory card. They recovered nine of the
videos after they had been deleted.
Kamehameha schools officials turned the camera over to Honolulu
police after they had
conducted their own investigation, which included a search of Alisna’s apartment and interviews of witnesses, and after they had fired
Alisna and allowed him to clear out of the apartment.
Nuuhiwa said he first learned of something involving Alisna in March 2013,
after school administrators met with the speech and
debate team’s student leaders. School officials told
the student leaders that
Alisna was leaving the school and encouraged them to contact him to show their support.
He said he learned the next day that Alisna had been fired over some pictures after the administrators met with parents and guardians. He said he was not told the nature of the pictures or who was in them. Then he said school officials met with the members of the debate team
offering them counseling, still without telling them why Alisna was fired.
Kamehameha agreed in July to pay $5 million to the families of four students, including Nuuhiwa’s family, who sued over the school administrators’ handling
of the affair. The families’ lawyer, Michael Green, said administrators had the shower videos in their possession when they encouraged students to contact and meet Alisna without knowing who was in the
videos.
The case has taken five years to reach trial because Kamehameha officials refused to turn over information from the school’s own investigation and wanted to have their security officers who conducted the search testify behind closed doors. Circuit Judge Rom Trader denied the
requests, Kamehameha
appealed, and the Hawaii
Supreme Court upheld Trader.