Anthony Theodore Wagoner, a 39-year-old White man, was found dead on April 23, 2024, after investigators were called to a property in the Hawai‘i Ocean View Estates subdivision in Ocean View on Hawai‘i Island. Shortly before 12:40 p.m., detectives responded to the 92-8700 block of Lotus Blossom Lane on a report of a decomposing body on the property, and what they discovered immediately felt wrong: the remains showed injuries that struck investigators as suspicious rather than natural or
accidental. Because the body was in an advanced state of decomposition, neither his identity nor an exact cause of death could be confirmed at the scene, and the case began as an unattended death investigation while detectives worked to reconstruct what had happened and when. 
In the days that followed, the uncertainty narrowed into something more definitive. An autopsy was conducted on April 29, 2024, and the forensic pathologist determined the death was caused by a single gunshot wound. With that finding, investigators shifted the case from an unattended death inquiry into a homicide case, treating the remote Ocean View property as the end point of violence rather than the site of an unexplained passing. 
By May 1, 2024, police publicly identified the victim as Anthony Theodore Wagoner and reported that his last known address was in Duluth, Minnesota, underscoring the distance between where he was last known to be living and where his remains were discovered. Investigators appealed to the community for help, asking anyone who may have heard gunshots near Lotus Blossom Lane and Princess Kaiulani Boulevard during the first week of April—or anyone with information tied to the killing—to come forward to detectives. The details released by authorities emphasized how investigators were trying to stitch together a timeline from fragmentary clues: a body found late, evidence of a shooting, and a neighborhood where the sound of gunfire might have been the one clear warning that something had gone terribly wrong. 
Publicly available updates from the investigating agency and local reporting around the identification did not name a suspect, describe an arrest, or announce criminal charges connected to Wagoner's killing. Instead, the official information focused on the discovery location, the autopsy result, and the request for witnesses and tips—signs of an investigation still working to determine who fired the shot, what brought Wagoner to that Ocean View property, and how the events of early April culminated in the body found on Lotus Blossom Lane later that month. 
