Late on the night of Nov. 7, 2019, a tense chain of calls and gunfire unfolded on Kula Kolea Drive near the Kalihi Valley Homes in Honolulu. Starsky Willy, 16, was a Native Hawaiian boy from Honolulu who was struck in the torso and rushed to the hospital in critical condition; he died the next day, Nov. 8, 2019.
Police and prosecutors said the fatal shot came from a nearby homeowner, Richard Obrero, who told officers he believed his property had been burglarized earlier that evening and
that a group of youths had returned, jumping a fence between his yard and the adjacent public housing complex. In the initial chaos, court records described officers arriving to find Obrero in his backyard wearing a ballistic vest, as he shouted that people were shooting at his house; officers also reported hearing BB or airsoft-style shots coming from behind a vehicle, and one witness shouting words to the effect that someone's “boy” had been shot. Obrero acknowledged having a gun and said he fired because he needed to defend himself.
Authorities arrested Obrero that same day, and within days prosecutors filed six felony complaints against him, including second-degree murder along with attempted murder counts and a firearm-related offense, as the case moved quickly into court. But the legal path soon became unusually tangled: on the morning of the scheduled preliminary hearing, prosecutors also sought a grand jury indictment—and the grand jury refused to return a true bill on any of the offenses presented. Even so, the preliminary hearing proceeded that afternoon, and the district court found probable cause on the six complaint charges and sent the case up to circuit court.
Years later, that sequence became the heart of a landmark ruling. In September 2022, the Hawaiʻi Supreme Court concluded that once the State chose to go to the grand jury and received no bills, it could not then initiate prosecution for the same incident through the complaint-and-preliminary-hearing route as a second attempt; the court held that using the two methods sequentially in that way violated the state constitution's structure for initiating felony prosecutions. The decision halted the prosecution as it had been brought, while also noting the State could return to a grand jury to seek an indictment only if it could present additional evidence not shown to the prior panel. No conviction resulted from the dismissed prosecution described in that ruling.
