Joey Richmond, a 46-year-old man, was found late on the evening of May 25, 2021, on Keauhou-Kainaliu Beach Road in Keauhou at a place locals call “End of the World.” A call came in around 9:30 p.m. reporting an unresponsive person on the roadway, and responding officers discovered Richmond on the ground with injuries consistent with multiple gunshot wounds.
He was taken to Hilo Medical Center, where he was pronounced dead, and an autopsy the next day determined he died from multiple gunshot wounds and that the manner of death was homicide.
In the hours that followed, investigators learned that the vehicle Richmond had been driving had been taken from the scene, turning the night’s violence into a second mystery that stretched beyond the dark roadside where he was found. By the following morning, police located the vehicle down an embankment on Keala O Keawe Road and it had been burned—an apparent attempt to erase a trail that would not, in the end, disappear.
As detectives pushed forward, attention narrowed to Ioane Asagra of Captain Cook. Police arrested Asagra on June 16, 2021, on a warrant for suspicion of second-degree murder, and the next day—after conferring with prosecutors—charged him with second-degree murder and arson. Reporting at the time described Asagra being brought back to Kailua-Kona from Honolulu, where he had been hospitalized while recovering from burns that were alleged to have been sustained when Richmond’s car was set on fire after the shooting. Witness accounts cited in contemporaneous coverage said a silver or gray BMW sped away from the area around the time of the shooting, and later authorities responded to a report of a vehicle fire off Highway 160 where a silver BMW was found burning.
By late June 2021, a Hilo grand jury indicted Asagra on one count each of second-degree murder and first-degree arson, and he posted $550,000 bail with strict conditions that included electronic monitoring requirements, prohibitions on weapons, and limits on contact with certain individuals. Subsequent coverage indicated prosecutors sought to keep him detained, and by the time the case reached a jury, he was described as being held without bail.
Two years after the killing, the case culminated in court. In June 2023, a Kona jury found Asagra guilty of murder in the second degree and arson in the first degree, with the arson allegation tied to setting fire to a BMW motor vehicle. In September 2023, prosecutors announced he was sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole for the murder conviction, along with a twenty-year prison term for the arson conviction—closing the legal chapter on a death that began on a quiet road in Keauhou and continued through a burned vehicle, an arrest, and a trial that ended in conviction.
