Why in the world isn’t the Star-Advertiser covering the civil trial involving Honolulu Police Chief Louis Kealoha’s wife, Katherine Kealoha, and her family? A closely related criminal case led to serious allegations of police misconduct made by a federal public defender, and an unprecedented referral by the U.S. Attorney to the FBI for investigation.
The current civil case isn’t your typical family dispute. It’s another potential window into what could be a major police scandal.
Yet the Star-Advertiser has been relying on brief, AP summaries of the trial proceedings.
The article appearing in today’s Star-Advertiser is all of 132 words in length.
The only “news” is in the first sentence: “The uncle of the Honolulu police chief’s wife says she promised to pay off a reverse mortgage on his 95-year-old mother’s home.” The rest is recap.
There’s not a single quote from testimony.
That’s worse than lame. And it’s embarrassing for the state’s largest newspaper to fail to cover such a prominent case with lots of public interest angles.
By the way, I did run across an interesting item relating to that “reverse mortgage.”
Most people would probably think of a reverse mortgage as a deal in which you get regular payments each month, a mortgage in reverse, and those payments don’t have to be repaid until the mortgage has run its course. It’s a kind of deal typically used by older homeowners as a source of regular income during their latter years, with the mortgage being repaid only after their deaths.
In the case of Katherine Kealoha’s grandmother, Florence Puana, the “reverse mortgage” for $938,250 on Puana’s Maunalani Heights home, was apparently paid out at one time, or over a short period, and at least some of the proceeds used to purchase a condominium for Kealoha’s uncle. That’s been reported.
But what I haven’t seen reported is that the reverse mortgage on Florence Puana’s home was foreclosed on by the lender, and Puana was ordered out of the house by the bank. The house was sold in September 2013.
This information is buried in the transcript of a videotaped deposition of Puana taken for the criminal trial of her son (and Katherine Kealoha’s uncle), Gerald Puana.
Questions are being asked by Federal Public Defender Alexander Silvert.
Q. You trusted Katherine Kealoha to take care of all of the paperwork regarding the reverse mortgage.
A. Yes, I did.Q. You don’t understand that paperwork, did you?
A. No.
Q. And you didn’t understand how much was to be paid.
A. No, I don’t know.
Q. She was going to take care of everything.
A. She said, she promised me not to worry. At first my son didn’t write, sign that paper for the mortgage, I did, because he said he has eight other siblings that he has to think about.
Q. But my point is that, at your age and your knowledge, you had no idea what was happening with the paperwork–
A. No.
Q. Katherine Kealoha was doing it all.
A. Yes.
Q. And as a result of what happened, you lost your house.
A. Yes.
Q. And you’ve sued her for that.
A. Yes.
Q. And she took money, is this correct, that she took money from the bank account–
MR. OSBORNE: Objection, leading.
MR. SILVERT: Okay. No further questions.
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Just another example how we still have the same old Star Bulletin under a new name. Yesterday in sports the headline on an NBA game had the wrong teams for the story, and no correction in today’s paper.
One thing the transcripts of that deposition shows: this is not a case of a senile 95 year old woman being manipulated every which way by her son. Florence Puana is sharp and gave on-point responses to even the most difficult questions. Her one big mistake was putting complete trust in her granddaughter with her most valuable possession, learning a bitter lesson in the process. In today’s world, family members are most certainly capable of stealing from each other.
This has been totally underreported, put under wraps.
Embarrassing.
MAYBE because Star-Advertiser Exec’s. know most people don’t care, as in yawn.
To most of us, Police Chief x, y, z = safety and security.
Negative publicity about Police Chief x, y, z = danger and in-security.
Who knows how this will all turn out. In the end, the Chief keeps his pension and property and the City hires a new Chief x, y, z.
See you at the mall.
Dearth of Coverage is shameful. Not only does it involve the spouse of the HPD Police Chief and the Gala for his appointment, it also involves a person on leave from a deputy prosecutor position.
How’s the Civil Beat coverage of the trial?