Keola Penovaroff, a 39-year-old man from Hilo, was shot on Thanksgiving night, November 26, 2015, outside a home on the 100 block of West Kawailani Street. Police said officers were sent there at about 10:20 p.m. and found him unresponsive outside the residence with a gunshot wound while witnesses described hearing gunfire and then hearing or seeing a car flee. He was rushed to Hilo Medical Center, but the night ended there, with Penovaroff pronounced dead at 10:57 p.m.
An autopsy completed a few days later found that he died from a gunshot wound to the chest, turning what began as a chaotic holiday-night emergency into a confirmed homicide investigation.
Almost immediately, investigators focused on a suspect: Kalani Lono Kaohimaunu, then 34. Police publicly identified him the next day, warned that he should be considered armed and dangerous, and said he might be traveling in a Honda or Acura sedan. The search did not last long. On the morning of November 28, detectives and special enforcement officers found Kaohimaunu in the Kalapana area and arrested him without incident on suspicion of second-degree murder. Detectives also recovered a dark blue Honda 4-door sedan. A woman who was with him, Charity Kumia, was arrested as well, but police said her arrest was on unrelated offenses involving an altered vehicle serial number and fraudulent license plates, not the killing itself.
By the evening of November 29, the case had hardened into formal charges. Police charged Kaohimaunu with second-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, ownership of a firearm prohibited, and place to keep a firearm. His bail was set at $1 million. Public reporting in the years that followed added a deeper layer to the story, placing the shooting outside the home of Penovaroff's girlfriend, Venus Mitchell, and describing an ongoing landlord-tenant dispute involving Mitchell, her mother, and Kaohimaunu's mother. That dispute was reported as a possible backdrop to the violence, suggesting that the killing may have grown out of tensions that had been building long before the gunfire on West Kawailani Street.
But the criminal case did not end with the arrest or the charges. It stretched on for years before finally reaching a jury. During trial, reporting said prosecutors argued that Venus Mitchell recognized Kaohimaunu as the man who shot Penovaroff. Even so, when the case was finally put in the jurors' hands in 2022, they did not convict him of murder. After a three-week trial, a jury found Kaohimaunu not guilty of second-degree murder in the 2015 slaying. Based on the publicly available reporting located here, Kaohimaunu was the named suspect, he was arrested and formally charged, but the murder charge ultimately ended in an acquittal rather than a conviction.
