Mateo D. Balinbin Jr., a 40-year-old male from Nānāwale Estates on Hawaiʻi Island, was found dead inside a home on Maui Street after police were called to the subdivision at about 2:19 p.m. on Monday, May 20, 2013. Early reports described a violent scene inside the residence and a community suddenly thrown into fear, with detectives told that another man had been seen leaving the home in a dark-colored pickup truck. The killing was first treated as a shooting investigation, and within hours officers had put out an all-points bulletin as they worked to find the man who had fled. Balinbin, remembered in his obituary as “Bradda Boy,” was later described as a Pahoa resident and former Hilo Termite employee, a man whose death left behind a fiancée, children, and other close family members.
Before the day was over, police said they had tracked down and arrested Seon Keoni Aki, 43, of Nānāwale Estates at a home in Hawaiian Paradise Park after receiving a tip. By the next day, after conferring with prosecutors, detectives formally charged Aki with second-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, ownership prohibited of a firearm, ownership prohibited of ammunition, place to keep a firearm, and first-degree terroristic threatening. Authorities said he was held at the Hilo police cellblock in lieu of $370,000 bail pending his initial court appearance. An autopsy then established the grim medical truth behind the case: Mateo D. Balinbin Jr. had died from an injury to the brain caused by a gunshot wound, and the death was officially ruled a homicide.
The case moved quickly in its first stages, but the accessible online sources located here are strongest on the arrest and charging phase rather than on a final courtroom ending. Contemporary reporting also noted that Aki was a convicted felon who had previously pleaded guilty in an earlier sexual assault case, a detail that helped explain the firearm and ammunition possession charges filed alongside the murder count. What the public record available through the sources clearly shows is that investigators believed the killing had been solved almost immediately, that Aki was identified as the lone suspect arrested in the aftermath, and that Balinbin's death was not left as a mystery but as a homicide that led straight to named charges. What is not clearly established in the online material I found is whether those charges ended in a trial, plea, conviction, or later dismissal, so the most reliable account remains the story of a fatal shooting in Nānāwale Estates, a neighbor taken into custody the same day, and a family forced into mourning almost as soon as the police tape went up.
