Michael Rosenbaum, a 76-year-old Native Hawaiian man, disappeared from the Pāhoa area in late July 2021, after being last seen alive on July 22 in Pāhoa town on Hawaiʻi Island. He was known to move around the community on foot, often walking from his home to nearby businesses or catching the bus, the sort of familiar routine that makes a sudden absence feel immediate to the people who recognize it.
When he did not come back, concern grew, and he was reported missing on July 24.
A week after he was last seen, the search for answers turned into something far darker. On July 31, 2021, a local fisherman at MacKenzie State Recreation Area in lower Puna discovered Rosenbaum’s body down on the rocks below the sea cliffs near the beach park. The scene was rugged and difficult to reach; responders had to work along the cliffside to recover him from below the shoreline. What began as a missing-person case was quickly treated as a homicide investigation.
An autopsy later concluded that Rosenbaum died from a gunshot wound. Investigators classified the case as second-degree murder, a determination that underscored the belief that his death was not accidental and not self-inflicted, but the result of violence. The location where he was found—beneath steep cliffs along a remote stretch of coast—left an impression of deliberate concealment, as though someone believed the ocean and the rocks would swallow the evidence and the story would end there.
Instead, the case stayed open, and investigators repeatedly returned to the public for help as time passed without a resolution. In the months and years after Rosenbaum was found, police issued renewed appeals asking anyone who had seen him in Pāhoa on July 22, or who noticed something unusual in the days that followed, to come forward. These updates emphasized that even small observations—an unfamiliar vehicle, an argument overheard, a sudden change in someone’s behavior, a detail that felt minor at the time—could matter when laid alongside other pieces.
No arrests, named suspects, or publicly announced charges have been reported in the official updates about this case. The investigation has remained active and classified as an unsolved murder, with detectives continuing to seek information that could identify who shot Rosenbaum and how he ended up below the MacKenzie cliffs.
