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Peter Boy: Three years, no answers

By Mike Gordon, Lynda Arakawa and Hugh Clark
Advertiser Staff Writers

June 4, 2000

James Sr. and Jaylin Kema pleaded publicly for their son's return. Advertiser library photo

The answers have eluded everyone for more than three years.

If the truth is out there, no one knows where to look.

The hunt has taken searchers to Kona and Hilo and the slopes of Mauna Kea, to ‘A‘ala Park and Halawa on O‘ahu.

Everyone has asked the same question countless times.

What happened to Peter Boy?

Peter Boy Kema. The brown-eyed 6-year-old whose face was plastered on Web pages, street fliers and bumper stickers. The missing child-abuse victim who was given away - his father claims - to a woman who may not exist.

What is clear from interviews with investigators, family members, social workers and others involved in the case is that no one believes that Peter Boy is alive.

But authorities appear closer than ever to assigning responsibility for his disappearance, even if his whereabouts remain a mystery. The Hawai‘i County prosecutor’s office said last week that it will ask a grand jury to review the evidence in the case.

Police and social workers with the state’s Child Protective Services have been unable to determine Peter Boy’s fate since April 1997. His plight was first widely reported in the Advertiser in April 1998.

Since the beginning of the case, many have questioned the actions of his parents, Peter and Jaylin Kema of Hilo. The two have denied any wrongdoing.

Detectives have been unable to confirm anything Peter Boy’s parents told them about the boy’s disappearance, including a frequently repeated account that he was given to an O‘ahu woman named Auntie Rose Makuakane at ‘A‘ala Park in August 1997.

Police have no evidence that any such person exists.

What they do have evidence of are the abuses heaped upon Peter Boy before his disappearance. They are chronicled in Family Court documents.

From fractures to starvation to being driven around while locked in the trunk of the family car, the small boy’s life was horrific.

No arrests have been made, and the case always has been classified as a missing persons investigation. But last week, Hawai‘i County Police Chief Wayne Carvalho said the department has considered upgrading it to a homicide investigation. Carvalho would not elaborate.

Neither of Peter Boy’s parents will publicly discuss what happened to their son, the third of Jaylin’s four children.

"I would hope both Mr. and Mrs. Kema, if they’re indicted, will be tried in a neutral forum," said Steven Strauss, Peter Kema Sr.’s attorney.

At this point, the Kemas have only each other.

They have lost parental custody of their three other children because of charges of abuse. The older children are with their natural father on the Mainland while the youngest child was adopted by her maternal grandparents in Kona.

Peter Boy disappeared three years ago after his father reportedly gave him away. Advertiser library photo

The nagging question

So, what happened to Peter Boy? The question continues to push family and friends across an emotional landscape that is as rugged as Big Island lava.

Lee Ann Kobayashi, the boy’s aunt, said she longs for the saga to end, even if that means her younger brother Peter winds up in court. She has spoken to him twice in the past three years, and each conversation ended in a fight.

The first time was in February 1997, when she accused her brother of abusing Peter Boy. The last time was December 1999 after the death of their sister, Rachel Simons.

"The evening of the funeral, there was a gathering at a family home, and lo and behold Peter shows up," Kobayashi said. "I approached him. I said: Make things right before you ever come around this family. I want you to make things right. I want you to go down to the police station and confess your sins."

She said tempers flared: He shoved her, she hit back, a dozen family members grabbed them both.

Her brother left.

Kobayashi said her brother looked as if he were wasting away. He is thinner, paler and his hair is falling out.

"It’s eating him up now inside," she said. "But we all know this is a hole he dug himself. Time and time again, we’ve said: Where’s the boy?"

She said she has never believed a word of his story. And she said she lives in fear every day that her brother will put a match to her family’s Kona home.

"I told the detectives many times about this, that he would do something like that," she said.

Family members are convinced Peter Boy is dead, Kobayashi said. At one point in 1998, they traveled to a Pahoa home where the Kemas once lived.

"They actually went down there with picks and shovels to see if they could find him," she said.

She has heard various stories about what Peter and Jaylin are doing. She said she believes they are living in public housing in Hilo.

Kobayashi said detectives told her that in January, they took a social worker with them to find the couple because they heard Jaylin was having another baby. But there was no child.

Kobayashi said she has spoken with FBI investigators working on the case. "The FBI profiled Peter as a person who covers his tracks," she said. "He can be in a crowd and be the happiest person and have a second side to him. They hit it on the mark."

Nothing so far has provided any lasting comfort.

At one point, Kobayashi said, Jaylin’s parents - James and Yolanda Acol - nearly convinced her that the Kemas had sold the child into slavery. "They had me thinking, maybe, but in my head I knew it wasn’t true," she said. "In my heart, I really don’t want to give up hope, but in my mind I have given up a long time ago."

Worried for the boy

Like Kobayashi, the Acols had feared for Peter Boy’s safety many months before the case became public.

They had good reason.

After the state investigated charges of abuse when Peter Boy was only 3 months old - court records show there was evidence of current and past fractures - the Acols were given foster custody of the boy and his two older half siblings in August 1991.

But four years later, Child Protective Services reunited the Kemas with their children and closed the case.

The Acols were never happy with that reunion, and the Kemas were resentful at having temporarily lost custody of their children. Gradually, contact between them dwindled to nothing.

The last time the Acols saw Peter Boy was Dec. 14, 1996, when the family gathered for a funeral.

Throughout 1997, Yolanda Acol called Child Protective Services to express concern about Peter Boy. The day after Christmas 1997, James Acol told a social worker that the boy had "a black eye and one arm was sprained" when he saw him at the funeral.

Nothing happened until January 1998, when a social worker convinced Jaylin Kema to file a missing-person report for Peter Boy.

By that March, James Acol’s frustration with the couple prompted a trip to Hilo, but his daughter wouldn’t allow him to see the children.

"I asked her where is Peter Boy, and she said he’s with Auntie Rose in Honolulu," he said in May 1998. "I said bring him back. She said she would. She claimed he wasn’t missing. I said if that’s true, where is he?"

The Acols have no idea what happened to Peter Boy and have told police that the less they know, the better.

In March, they adopted Jaylin’s youngest child, who is in the first grade. Their relationship with Jaylin is "fading away," Yolanda Acol said.

"They don’t contact us, and we don’t contact them," she said. "It is hard, but they broke the law. We’re trying to go on with our lives."

At 53, Yolanda did not expect to be raising another child. She and James, 57, have five of their own children.

"The little girl has been a spiritual thing for us," she said. "It is hard to forgive and forget, but being that this little girl is here, we are trying to make the best of it."

Outside investigations

Walt McIntosh, a Honolulu insurance investigator, volunteered to help find Peter Boy after a friend told him about the case. The friend was Alice Taniguchi, paternal grandmother for Peter Boy’s two half siblings.

McIntosh convinced private investigator Joe Cabrejos, vice president of Goodenow Associates Inc., to help him. After several trips to the Big Island, they produced an inch-thick report that was given to Big Island police and prosecutors in September 1999.

It offered intriguing information from nontraditional sources: psychics.

With the help of the Hawaii Remote Viewers Guild, the investigators traveled to what they believe is "a probable location on where Peter Boy’s body might be buried." The site was Mauna Kea State Park in Pohakuloa.

Guild members believe the child was struck on the head and choked to death, then buried by one person, a man.

They say he was bound by a covering and will be wearing a T-shirt, black shorts and will have a toy tied to him.

"What I brought to this was hopefully an investigator’s open mind," McIntosh said. "I’m not trying to build a case against Peter Kema Sr. or a case against anybody. I was trying to discover the truth."

That search led Cabrejos to Kona last August to investigate claims of a local pastor that Peter Boy was buried in the Mauna Ziona Church cemetery.

The Rev. Norman Keanaaina told Cabrejos that he saw Peter and Jaylin Kema in the graveyard sometime in January or February 1998. He said the couple, whom he didn’t immediately recognize, had a pick and shovel and was standing near the grave of Peter’s stepbrother, Henry Mahi Kaai.

They had burlap, plastic bags and a truck, said Keanaaina, who said he watched from a distance for a while before hearing: "Peter, someone is watching us."

Two days later, the pastor noticed that Kaai’s grave was covered with cinder of a different color than the rest of the cemetery. When Keanaaina heard about the missing boy in April, he called police. He said they examined the grave and drew diagrams, but nothing was exhumed.

McIntosh sent a copy of Keanaaina’s story to the FBI and considers it credible.

"I thought, on the basis of the pastor’s statement and on the basis of at least some tentative opinion of the rocks at the grave, that the grave site should have been checked out," he said.

McIntosh said the FBI told him a week ago that it will continue to help police and prosecutors "obtain criminal indictments against those responsible for Peter Boy’s suspected murder."

Looking to the law

So what happened to Peter Boy? What if he really was given away at ‘A‘ala Park by his father? Child welfare advocates asked those questions and then went looking for loopholes in Hawaii’s laws. They wanted to craft a statute that could prevent a similar situation from happening again.

"There wasn’t any solution that we could have done statutorily," said state House Human Services and Housing Committee Chairman Dennis Arakaki (D-Kalihi Valley, Kamehameha Heights).

"We even researched this nationally," he said. "There was nothing that would have applied."

Such a law also would have been too broad and would even have prohibited parents from dropping children off at a baby-sitter’s, said Annabel Murray, project coordinator of Na Keiki Law Center, which provides volunteer legal representation for children.

Current law allows criminal charges for abandonment and child endangerment.

"It would be nice to think we could figure out much narrower (language), but I don’t think we can do it," Murray said.

"Would we really want a society where we tell every parent how to parent? And what are they going to do, sign a release, I’m taking my child on a trip?"

Pam Ferguson-Brey, an advisory board member for Missing Child Center-Hawai‘i, was involved in the effort and said such a law would "criminalize something that we don’t believe happened."

Creating a new law is a diversion, she said. Instead, the focus needs to be on child protective services.

"I didn’t want to draft something where people could pretend we created a solution when in reality we hadn’t even been looking in the right direction," she said.

"When we think about how can we make sure that this doesn’t happen again, I don’t think you can point to the failure of any current statutory provisions or that we’re lacking any statutory provisions. I think that the people who are mandated to protect children did not act quickly enough to protect this child."

Staff actions defended

Department of Human Services officials maintain that their staff followed department procedures properly in handling the case.

Even though the department received a report of alleged abuse on April 4, 1997, from the therapist of Peter Boy’s cousin, a social worker did not investigate for two months, according to Family Court documents.

Human services officials believed the cousin, a 15-year-old girl, was not a credible source.

"It was considered a low-risk case," Susan Chandler, human services director said in April 1998. "We had no other evidence to think it was high risk. And then when we did go out, we told the police."

Police maintain that all they knew in the summer of 1997 was that a social worker was investigating the Kemas. They said that they were not told the child might be missing until January 1998.

"I think in general, the procedures that were in place at the time were basically followed," said Patricia Snyder, head of the department’s Social Services Division. "But whether procedures should improve, that’s the issue, I think."

Snyder pointed to two important changes: A new system to evaluate incoming cases and increased - and timely - communication with police should improve the way the system helps abused children.

"The lesson learned always is that if anyone has some concern about a child, they should report it to the authorities immediately and not wait," Snyder said. "And if they feel that no one is paying attention to them, they should indeed yell louder."

But Ferguson-Brey pointed out that Peter Boy’s relatives did complain: "If family members were calling, what more could the community have done?"

The question endures

So where’s Peter Boy?

What happened?

Who’s to blame?

Like so many questions about Peter Boy, the answers appear elusive.

Their absence fuels the anguish of a divided family.

Lee Ann Kobayashi does not know if her brother will offer an answer that she finally will believe.

Not a day passes, however, that she doesn’t pray for that.

"I want this to end," she said. "I want it to be put to rest."