Maria Paris Leva, a 94-year-old Hispanic woman from Kihei, Hawaii, was found dead on January 8, 2021, in a case authorities described as an apparent murder-suicide. The first alarm came not from a passerby on the highway, but from a signal meant to protect someone in distress: police said they were dispatched to a Kihei residence late that morning after a GPS pendant alarm triggered a call for help.
What began as a welfare check quickly widened into a far more troubling scene.
Later that day, officers located two people in a vehicle off Maui Veterans Highway, both suffering from what police described as apparent gunshot wounds. In the days and weeks that followed, police identified the deceased as Maria and her husband, Arthur Leva, also of Kihei. Investigators recovered a. 38-caliber revolver at the scene, a grim detail that anchored the early narrative of how the couple died, even as the finer points of what happened inside the final moments remained difficult to pin down from public statements.
By mid-February 2021, authorities were still characterizing the deaths as an apparent murder-suicide, and reporting indicated police did not publicly answer whether they had determined which person fired the weapon. In practical terms, that meant there was no outside suspect being sought, no manhunt, and no arrest to announce. If there was a person responsible, the publicly reported circumstances pointed back to the scene itself, where both potential victim and perpetrator were already gone.
Public remembrances of Maria focused on the life that existed before that January morning. Her obituary described her as a longtime partner in a marriage filled with shared experiences and friendships, and those who left messages spoke of trips, laughter, and a graceful presence that felt larger than the small island community that came to know her. But the manner of her death, framed by police as a murder-suicide, left a darker afterimage: an ending that raised painful questions while offering little room for the kind of justice story that usually follows. With no surviving suspect to charge, no courtroom to fill, and no verdict to render, the case settled instead into the quiet, unresolved space that sometimes follows domestic tragedies—where the facts are stark, the motives remain largely private, and the loss is permanent.
