Tyrone Torres, a 21-year-old man from Puna, Hawaiʻi, died on February 25, 2007, in a killing that unfolded first as a shooting and then as an apparent attempt to erase what had happened. Police later identified him as the body found inside a burned car in Lower Puna, near the shoreline in the Waʻa Waʻa area. Preliminary autopsy findings said he had been killed by a single shotgun blast to the head, making clear that the fire came after the fatal violence, not before.
As the case came into view, investigators focused quickly on a teenage suspect who knew Torres. Archived reporting said Torres had been sitting in a car in Nanawale Estates with the suspect's former girlfriend when Malaki McBride, then 17, allegedly found them, opened the car door, and fired one shotgun blast into Torres' head. Reports from the time describe the scene as rooted in jealousy and emotional turmoil, with prosecutors later portraying the shooting as deliberate while the defense argued McBride was acting under extreme mental or emotional disturbance.
There was an arrest almost immediately. Police charged the 17-year-old with second-degree murder, use of a firearm in the commission of a felony, second-degree arson, and unauthorized control of a propelled vehicle. Because he was a juvenile at the time of the killing, the case began in Family Court, but a judge later cleared the way for him to be prosecuted as an adult. Court and news accounts identify McBride as the central and publicly named suspect in the homicide. The court record also shows that before trial, the State withdrew the arson count, while the remaining case moved forward on the homicide, firearm, and vehicle-related charges.
By the time the case reached trial, the central legal fight was no longer over who fired the shot. In the Hawaiʻi appellate record, McBride stipulated that he knowingly caused Torres' death with a firearm, and he separately entered a guilty plea to the firearm charge. That left the jury to decide whether he had proved the defense of extreme mental or emotional disturbance, which would have reduced the killing from murder to manslaughter, and whether he knowingly used his sister's vehicle without permission. The jury rejected that defense and convicted him of second-degree murder and unauthorized control of a propelled vehicle.
The sentence reflected how seriously the court treated the killing. McBride received life imprisonment on the murder conviction, five years on the vehicle charge, and twenty years on the firearm charge, with the latter sentences ordered to run concurrently with each other but consecutively to the life term. His conviction and sentence were later addressed on appeal, with the Hawaiʻi Intermediate Court of Appeals recounting the procedural history and the stipulations that had narrowed the issues at trial. Based on the online sources reviewed, no additional suspects were publicly identified in connection with Torres' death; the arrest, prosecution, and conviction centered on McBride alone.
