Dexter “DJ” Blue-Lorenzo Jr., a 3-year-old boy, was found dead inside a Waialua home on February 28, 2022, in a case that left family and neighbors struggling to understand how an ordinary morning could end in silence.
Police were called to the home after a report of an argument. When officers arrived, they encountered a girl outside who said she could not open a locked bedroom door where her father and her little brother were inside.
With the door shut and time pressing, officers located an open window at the rear of the home, climbed in, and found an adult man and the child lying on a bed with gunshot wounds. Police indicated the man’s wound was self-inflicted, and the scene was treated as an apparent murder-suicide from the outset. The child’s mother was not at home at the time of the shooting, and an autopsy was scheduled as investigators worked to confirm what happened behind the locked door.
In the days that followed, the Honolulu Medical Examiner’s Office confirmed what police had suspected: the deaths were ruled a murder-suicide involving a Waialua man and his son. That ruling meant there would be no manhunt, no custody battle in a courtroom, and no criminal case advancing through arraignments or trial—only an investigation closing around a tragedy whose suspected perpetrator was already dead.
The suspected shooter was identified in contemporaneous reporting as Dexter Blue-Lorenzo, also known as Dexter Lazo, and he was described as a corrections officer. With the suspect deceased, there were no arrests connected to DJ’s death, no charges filed, and no later prosecutions. The case, instead, became one more story of a small child lost to violence in a place that still had to wake up the next day and keep going, even as grief lingered in the community.
Away from the police reports and official findings, the details of DJ’s short life were remembered through family notices: he was born in Honolulu and was mourned by loved ones who tried to hold onto the pieces of him that were untouched by the way he died. In those remembrances, he was spoken of with tenderness—funny, energetic, and deeply loved—while those left behind organized services and asked for support with funeral expenses in the wake of the loss.
