These posts are based on our Good Guy with a Gun calendar. Today’s post is significantly updated from the calendar version.
This is an astounding story, and long, and not cheerful: Over 1800 words, over 30 linked sources, three deceased victims, and one dead perpetrator — and you should really watch the videos. Start reading when you have a little time.
The two families — Hiram and Sandy Silva, and Rishard and Alison Keamo-Carnate — had been on the same Waianae Valley lane for more than twenty years. Their fathers had been friends.
The Silvas owned about nineteen acres at the end of that lane, and they had built on it a large Quonset hut that everybody called the Silva Dome. It had gone up without a permit, and he rented it out for parties.
Early on a Sunday morning in 2021, a driver leaving an illegal hip-hop concert at the Silva’s place — thrown while the COVID gathering restrictions were still on — hit the Keamo-Carnates’ car head-on on the single lane they shared.
Alison later said, “We attempted to make peace with our neighbors, the Silvas. We hoped to plan for a safer future, but they declined to come to our home to discuss what happened, after over 20 plus years of being neighbors.”
So two days after the crash, she emailed a four-page letter to a city council member, two state representatives, and two state senators.
“How does corruption end in my vulnerable, helpless, scared and tired community? What are our leaders going to do about it? Do they care enough? Will we continue to be silenced because we are beneath?”
That very night, Silva swung a spotlight mounted on his construction equipment into the Keamo property.
“One man. One man by himself. Come on down, only one man – come on down…stop hiding…I tired of [inaudible] with you guys already. You guys all dead. Not today or tomorrow…you think I don’t know people?”
Officers who watched that video were instructed to go arrest him for felony terroristic threatening.
They found him behind his gate. He told them the gate was broken, sarcastically denied being who he was, and said the neighbors had been trying to kill him. The officers on scene decided there were no exigent circumstances, and they went home.
“We called the cops,” Rishard said, “and the cops said I can’t do nothing about it, because they can’t just go into somebody’s property because he had the gate. I felt kind of discouraged.”
The charge went nowhere after that either — the family never pressed it. “They were really afraid he was going to carry out his threat, and he did so,” their attorney said later.
So the Keamo-Carnates did what reasonable people do.
“We never owned guns,” Rishard said. “We didn’t like guns. We purchased it after we was threatened. They just basically collected dust. We never know if we were going to use it.”
“The turning point was when our kids got scared,” Alison said. “That’s when we decided we had to change something and do something different, because our kids should not be fearful of our home or where we live.”
Silva threatened to shoot the family again the following year, according to their attorney. After that the record thins out: police answered one disagreement between the neighbors in 2023, and no calls at all to the Keamo house the year after.
The city had a file of its own on the property. Its planning department had looked into at least twenty complaints going back to 2001 and put a lien on the place in 2015; by the week of the shooting the fines had reached $587,250.
“Outside of foreclosing on the property, DPP has really taken all of the actions available to them in terms of enforcement,” a city spokesman said.
Which brings us to a Saturday night on the Labor Day weekend, with the family’s annual mahjong tournament winding down — awards handed out, dinner over, roughly twenty people still around, some of them out in the carport.
There was a party at the dome that night too, and the guests had spent the evening tearing up and down the lane. So Rishard and Alison walked down to ask them to stop.
He talked to Silva’s daughter first, and then to Silva’s wife.
“Sandy came out yelling at what we doing on their property?” he said. “I said, ‘We tired, Sandy. The speeding’s got to stop.’ It de-escalated less than five minutes, 10 minutes. We’re on our way. We said our apologies to her; she said our apologies to us.”
They walked back up. About an hour and a half later they heard a low humming noise.
Silva’s front-end loader came up the driveway, and he smashed it into the covered lanai, shoving the parked cars into the house. (There’s a brief clip of this in the first video in Sources — it’s hard to see it in a still image.) That went on for about forty-five seconds.
Rishard, on his teenage son: “He’s my hero, that man, my son. He took his sister out of harm’s way. He picked her up before a car could have smashed her into the house.”
Four fifty-five-gallon drums of fuel were riding on the loader, and witnesses said he put rounds into them. They didn’t ignite: This was a psychotic event, but it wasn’t the movies.
The collapsing porch roof had forced the driver’s door shut, so he shot from the right-side door, before he’d even gotten out of the cab. He fired somewhere between fifteen and twenty times at the people in the carport.
Five people were hit. Three of them died. Cherell Keamo, 36, died of a gunshot wound to the head. Courtney Raymond-Arakaki, 34, and Jessyca Amasiu, 29, died of multiple gunshot wounds. All three were cousins of the family, up for the tournament. A 31-year-old man and a 52-year-old woman were critically wounded, but both came through surgery.
“I thought he was done,” Rishard said. “Then he started going again, so I ran upstairs to grab my gun. When I was upstairs trying to grab it and unlock it, that’s when I heard the gunshots. I was scared myself.”
He came down with a 9 mm Glock and put cars between himself and Silva, forty or fifty feet off: “He had his rifle, his AK-47, in his hands.”
Silva’s own daughter ran into the driveway shouting, “Dad, what are you doing? Stop!”
“He [Silva] was saying, ‘They like come to my house. They think I playing. I going kill’em all.’ As he was walking out… I just fired.”
He emptied an eight-round magazine, ran back upstairs for more ammunition, and while he was up there cut the lights in the house, because people were still running around the property and he didn’t want Silva picking anybody out of the dark.
Then he came back down and fired again. Silva was hit three times, in the upper arm and torso, the left back, and the left hand, and he died there. His blood alcohol content was 0.182%.
The whole thing took about two minutes.
Somewhere in it he told Alison what he was setting out to do.
“I remember telling her (Alison), ‘I going stop him.’ I wish I was more prepared for this. I was telling myself, ‘I gotta stop him,’ but at the same time I might not be able to come home after I do this.”
Rishard’s Glock was registered and he was a licensed owner; Silva’s pistol and his AK-47 were unregistered. But because Hawaii talks about aloha but hates people who defend themselves, Rishard was arrested an hour after the first calls came in.
He recalled: “One of the cops that was searching upstairs said, ‘Hold him. He could be a possible suspect.’ That’s when they made me sit down on the rock. They just said because I could be a possible suspect for murder. They bagged my hands and handcuffed me.”
“I was still trying to get my family settled and figure out where everyone was,” Alison said, “and I just told him to hold on and it’s okay to go and we can take care of it.”
The charge was murder in the second degree. The police chief said:
“We are a non-stand your ground state; even if you had a license to carry, if you’re an individual that discharges a firearm that is involved in injuring another person, you will, more than likely, have not, almost guaranteed you’re going to be arrested.”
“They [police officers] was actually praising me that I did the right thing,” Rishard said, “but all that was going through my head — I was scared, because I didn’t know what was going on on the outside. And I thought I wasn’t coming back home to my family.”
They let him go pending investigation a little before eight that evening, about twenty hours in. Alison had come down with blankets for him and was told instead that he was coming home.
Then he had to wait for eighteen days.
The prosecutor’s office finally declined the case, finding that Rishard had been “acting in self-defense and defense of others” and, under the statutes it cited, “not obliged to retreat from his dwelling.”
“I looked at my phone and saw the alert,” Rishard said. “I started crying. It was a blessing.”
Their attorney, Michael Green, said he was pursuing civil claims against Silva’s estate, the police department, and the city.
The Silva Dome came down a few months later. Because the structure was gone, the city issued no penalty for it.
“I felt sick, honestly,” Alison said. “Because I feel like, why did it take so long and why did all of this have to happen before something was actually done?”
The next Labor Day weekend the family held the mahjong tournament again, on the same lanai.
Twenty complaints, a lien, $587,250 in fines, a four-page letter to five lawmakers, and an instruction to arrest that nobody carried out. What stopped Hiram Silva in the end was a neighbor with a registered handgun, standing forty or fifty feet off behind a parked car.
Sources
Local News
Hawaii News Now obtained the family’s 2021 cell phone video and the police account of why no arrest was made that night, and its three-part series is where the Keamo-Carnates tell it themselves.
Suspect identified in deadly Waianae shooting that stemmed from dispute between neighbors (Day-of)
Family complaint may have provoked Waianae shooting that ended with 4 dead, 2 injured (The timing of the attack)
Attorney: Man who fatally shot suspect believed he had to protect his home, family (The defense attorney)
Medical Examiner’s office identifies victims in deadly Waianae Valley shooting (The victims named)
Loved ones remember woman killed in Waianae Valley shooting as ‘the most pure soul’ (The neighborhood board meeting)
Family targeted in Waianae mass shooting had pleaded for a safer neighborhood (The 2021 letter to lawmakers)
Despite 2021 threat, police chose not to arrest suspect accused in deadly Waianae shooting (The 2021 non-arrest)
‘I just fired’: Waianae couple recounts horrific attack that led to husband killing neighbor (Part two of the series)
Man who killed Waianae Valley shooter describes moments leading to deadly rampage (Part one)
Waianae family targeted by mass shooter thanks community for support (Part three)
Months after a deadly Waianae Valley rampage, an illegal party structure is being dismantled (The dome comes down)
Family attacked in mass shooting resumes tradition to close tragic chapter (One year later)
KHON2 covered it from the night of the attack through the charging decision.
4 dead in Waianae Valley front loader rampage, shooting (Day-of)
Dispute between neighbors leaves 4 people dead, 2 critically hurt in Waianae Valley (The police briefing)
Waianae family asks for healing related to neighbor shooting (Two days after)
Self-defense still being investigated after latest West Oahu shooting (The police update)
Man who shot neighbor driving front loader into Waianae home not charged (The declination)
Honolulu Civil Beat ran six pieces, including the city’s enforcement file on the property and the legislative argument that followed.
Man Who Killed Shooter In Waianae Acted In Self-Defense, Lawyer Says (The feud and the city’s record)
The 3 Women Killed In Waianae Shooting Are Remembered For Their ‘Love And Aloha’ (The victims)
Waianae Shootings May Spur A Push To Strengthen Hawaii’s Self-Defense Laws (The duty-to-retreat debate)
Waianae Man Will Not Be Charged For Shooting Neighbor Who Killed Three (The declination)
Autopsy: Waiʻanae Shooter Died Of Gunshot Wound To Torso (The autopsy)
House GOP Wants A Stand-Your-Ground Law For Hawaiʻi (The following session)
The Honolulu Star-Advertiser’s declination story is linked as it ran in The Garden Island, and its sit-down interview with the Keamo-Carnates as reprinted on Yahoo.
HPD releases man who allegedly shot rampaging Waianae neighbor (Release from custody)
Medical Examiner releases IDs, cause of death for 4 killed in Waianae (The Medical Examiner’s IDs)
Waianae attacker threatened to shoot his victims’ family twice before, attorney says (The attorney interview)
Waianae victims remembered as 3 caring women, devoted to family (The victims)
Shooter who ended Waianae rampage won’t be charged (The declination, syndicated)
Waianae man who killed charging neighbor: ‘I going stop him’ (The interview, reprinted)
KITV Island News filed three times.
4 Dead, 2 critically injured in Waianae shooting involving Front Loader incident (Day-of, with an afternoon update stacked on top)
Victims in deadly Waianae shooting rampage identified by Medical Examiner (The victims named)
Charges dropped for man who fatally shot suspect in deadly Waianae dispute (The declination)
National News
3 women killed, gunman dead in Hawaii after dispute between neighbors leads to gunfire (CBS News, from the AP)
3 Women Killed in Waianae Shooting Remembered for Their ‘Love And Aloha’ (KPUA, the wire item)
2A / specialist media
Deadly Dispute: Family Gathering In Hawaii Turns Fatal After Neighbor’s Rampage (Concealed Nation)
Honolulu: Man Stops and Kills Mass Shooter, and Is Promptly Arrested...for Murder (RedState)
No Charges Filed Against Hawaii Man Who Shot Suspect on Front Loader After Ramming Cars and Killing Three (USA Carry)
Lack of ‘Stand Your Ground’ Rights Under Scrutiny in Hawaii (Colion Noir)