There’s a federal hate crime case that you probably haven’t heard about before. About 10 years ago, Chris Kunzelman’s wife Lori was diagnosed with MS. Chris and Lori lived in Scottsdale, Arizona but in light of the diagnosis they decided to make a major change. He asked her where she wanted to live out the remainder of her life and she picked Hawaii. So they paid $175,000, site unseen, for a run down house on the beach in Maui.

The house needed work and so in February 2014 Kunzelman and his uncle traveled to the small fishing village where it was located in order to start moving things in and setting it up for he and his wife to move there. And that’s when things turned ugly. Two native men who lived nearby showed up at his house and attacked him and his uncle.

Two neighbors punched him, struck him in the head with a shovel and bashed in his car windows as he tried to escape.

The suspects — Hawaiians whose families had lived in Kahakuloa village for generations — told police they believed Kunzelman was trespassing. Ultimately, they pleaded guilty to local prosecutors’ charges of assault and were sentenced to probation.

In other words, the two men got off easy after beating Kunzelman and his uncle and chasing him out of his own house. Kunzelman saw it as home team justice.

Under the plea agreement reached in 2019, Alo-Kaonohi was sentenced to four years of probation, and Aki received probation and time-served in prison, about seven months. Both men apologized to Kunzelman, but he was not satisfied.

“The only word I can come up with is corruption,” he told Hawaii News Now in 2019. “Both of them got probation and absolutely nothing. They got off Scot-free.”

But the story didn’t end there because the feds began investigating. In 2020 a federal grand jury indicted the two men again, this time for a hate crime, meaning prosecutors believed Kunzelman was attacked because he was white. Kunzelman claimed the two men made explicit racist comments during the attack, part of which was captured on video by a camera in Kunzelman’s car. That recording, which included audio, contained one use of a racial term for white people.

In video footage, Aki can be heard using the term “Haole,” a Hawaiian word for outsiders, usually referring to White people, that is sometimes used pejoratively. He later told police Kunzelman was a “typical Haole” trying to use his wealth to “change everything up in Kahakuloa.”

Assistant U.S. attorney Chris Thomas said at the trial that the defendants told Kunzelman that his “skin is the wrong [expletive] color” and that no White man would ever live in their neighborhood. Defense lawyers challenged the accusations, saying no racial threats could be heard on the security video.

The attackers also made statements like “You guys don’t belong here” which are more open to interpretation. Last December the two men were convicted and the sentencing took place Thursday. Judge J. Michael Seabright told one of the two men at the sentencing hearing, “You were racist on that day.” One of the attackers got six years and the other got four years in federal prison.

I think the obvious lesson here is that anyone can be racist. It’s worth noting for context that in 2020 the FBI reported there were 2,871 racially motivated attacks against black people and 869 against white people. Those were the top two in that category. Finally, here’s a news report including some of the video of the attack from Honolulu’s KHON 2 News.

Update: I’d never seen this before but came across it while looking at clips about this case. I don’t know if everyone knows who Laird Hamilton is but he’s one of the best big wave surfers ever. He grew up on the island of Kauai.