Police charged Ronante Aquino yesterday with second-degree murder in the stabbing death of Zenaida Dumaslan of Pearl City.

Police said Aquino, 39, came into the Pearl City police station early Saturday morning and told them he had just stabbed his girlfriend. He was arrested after leading police to his girlfriend's bloody kitchen, where she lay dead.

Bail for Aquino was set at $150,000.

Dumaslan, 39, was apparently killed while both her 5-year-old son and elderly father were home sleeping.

"There was blood on the floor, blood on the ceiling, blood on the walls. I never imagined I would see so much blood," said Harold Ishigo, Dumaslan's landlord, who lives in the same Pearl City duplex.

Yesterday Ishigo recalled that he heard noises outside of her unit around 2 a.m. Saturday. He thought it may have been someone coming home from a night of partying.

"Someone was trying to get into the gate and the gate has a combination padlock. About 2 o'clock, 2:30, you could hear someone shaking things up," he said.

He then heard someone yell, "Stop."

Silence returned and Ishigo said he went back to sleep.

Then, shortly after 4 a.m., Ishigo said police woke him up and told him that Dumaslan had been stabbed in her kitchen.

Aquino went to the Pearl City police station around 4 a.m and said he had killed his girlfriend, Dumaslan, police said.

Aquino was unable to give police her address, so he took them to her Pearl City duplex unit, where she was found dead on the kitchen floor in a pool of blood.

Ishigo said the kitchen was so bloody that he had to hire an outside company to clean it up late Saturday afternoon.

A watermelon that had been randomly hacked up with a knife was also sitting on the kitchen counter, he said.

Dumaslan had moved into the unit earlier this month with her 5-year-old son, said Ishigo. Her elderly father had recently arrived in Honolulu from the Philippines and had been staying with her since last week, he said.

Both her son and her father were home at the time of the killing, Ishigo said.

He said he remembered only seeing Dumaslan's boyfriend once or twice, mainly when she was moving in.

Dumaslan worked at Waipahu High School and had been a school teacher back in the Philippines, he said.

Waipahu High Principal Pat Pedersen said yesterday that Dumaslan was an educational assistant in the school's special education program. "She would work with small groups of students in cooperation with a teacher," Pedersen said.

She said Dumaslan was dedicated to her job and well-liked.

Dumaslan's son and father are staying with relatives in Waipahu, Ishigo said.

"She was a very nice woman. I didn't really see her much," he said. "I'm just concerned for her boy right now."

Reach Loren Moreno at lmoreno@honoluluadvertiser.com.