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ASD Staff

Hawai'i Skies

Today's Hawai‘i Skies was captured by Nohua on Saddle Road. "Like I needed to take the photo."

To submit your Hawai'i Skies photo, visit us 

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<title>Hawaiʻi Skies: An absolute</title>

Today's Hawai‘i Skies was captured by Nohua on Saddle Road.

Hawaiʻi Skies: An absolute

Today&#039;s Hawai‘i Skies was captured by Nohua on Saddle Road. &quot;Like I needed to take the photo.&quot; To submit your Hawai&#039;i Skies photo, visit us online or email: general@alohastatedaily.com

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta Headshot

Kelli Shiroma Braiotta

Food & Dining

Giezel Alimboyoguen, owner and founder of 

, recalls how she used to prepare a Filipino-style shawarma for friends and family at potlucks.

“It wasn’t until someone asked if they could place an order that I truly saw the potential (in our product),” she says. “It (the shawarma) was inspired by a favorite vendor I grew up with, back in the Philippines, and I wanted to recreate that experience here on the Island. Our business was driven by a desire to bring a taste of home to our community.”

Shawarma Break officially started in 2024 and started popping up at events around Oʻahu. The business name came to Alimboyoguen while she was eating shawarma.

“I was eating while taking a much-needed break, and it just clicked,” she says. “It perfectly captured that moment of pause and enjoyment that I wanted our customers to feel.”

The business offers shawarma wraps ($18) — available with beef, chicken or shrimp fillings — shawarma rice bowls ($19), loaded hot dogs ($15) and keiki quesadillas ($13). Shawarma Break’s tagline is ‘The Home for Sharing,’ according to Alimboyoguen, who says that customers can take advantage of a permanent “buy one, get one free” deal for every menu item.

“‘The home for sharing,’ isn’t just a phrase; it’s a foundational value for our family,” she says. “We built our business model around a permanent ‘buy one, get one free’ deal as a way to teach our two daughters about the joy and importance of sharing with others. We are committed to keeping that BOGO deal as a permanent part of our menu, ensuring that every meal is an opportunity to share something delicious with a loved one.”

Shawarma wraps are the most popular option for the BOGO deal. Wraps include onions, cucumbers, garlic yogurt sauce and tomatoes, along with a protein of choice.

The business also offers double break wrap combos ($22) or double break bowl combos ($23), which include the business’s signature soda floats.

So far, the business has been a vendor at events like Foodie Con, Taste of Aloha Night Market, Honolulu Night Market and the Pineapple Festival in Wahiawā, to name a few. Alimboyoguen is especially excited for her business to participate in Made in Hawaiʻi Festival for the first time.

“The most important thing I want people to know is that Shawarma Break is about so much more than just a quick meal,” Alimboyoguen says. “It’s a project rooted in our family values. By committing to our permanent ‘buy one, get one free’ model, we aren’t just serving food. We are actively teaching our two daughters about the value of generosity.

“When you support us, you’re supporting that vision,” she adds. “You’re helping us build a legacy that puts people, community and sharing at the very center of everything we do.”

For updates and information, follow the biz on 

“We are so grateful for the warm welcome we’ve received across the Island,” Alimboyoguen says. “We can’t wait to grow alongside the community. We have some exciting plans in the pipeline, so keep an eye on our Instagram to see where we’ll be popping up next. We’d love to see everyone there.”

Shawarma Break owner 080726

<title>Shawarma Break features a permanent buy one, get one free deal</title>

The business, which started doing pop-ups in late 2024, is a first-time vendor at Made in Hawaiʻi Festival. Shawarma Break’s tagline is “The Home for Sharing,” according to business owner Giezel Alimboyoguen, who explains the meaning behind its BOGO menu items.

Shawarma Break features a permanent buy one, get one free deal

Ray Tsuchiyama

Business & Tourism

Columnists

During my two decades in Japan, every summer I traveled to Honolulu for our family vacation. After the flight from Tokyo, I would drive on Nimitz Highway, looking at miles of rusting warehouses and used-car lots, along with hundreds of single-wall homes and walk-up apartment buildings. And on every trip, I would ponder: Why hasn't anything changed since I first moved to Kalihi a few years after Statehood?

When I moved to Tokyo in 1991, I saw acres of old buildings and tiny streets in the middle of a vast metropolis. One by one, I witnessed hundreds of family-owned parcels assembled and redeveloped into projects such as Roppongi Hills, Tokyo Midtown and, more recently, Azabudai Hills.

The contrast was staggering: old Tokyo residential neighborhoods becoming new mixed-use districts with retail, restaurants, entertainment, hotels and, most importantly, new housing.

I was witnessing a different development process.

Why didn't Hawaiʻi develop an equivalent process?

During my Hawaiʻi visits, over lunch with friends at Bishop Street law and banking firms, the conversation would return again and again to what they regarded as the Holy Grail of Hawaiʻi's economic discussion:

In hindsight, perhaps these questions started from the wrong place.

Of course, tourism is the obvious economic engine. But Hawaiʻi also has generationally accumulated private wealth, much of it embedded in real estate — which is a role rarely discussed in Hawaiʻi’s economy.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Families own:"}]

Much of this wealth is invisible in conventional economic-development discussions.

Hawaiʻi has two economies: the visible economy of visitors and the invisible economy of accumulated local capital.

Yet being “invisible” does not mean that Hawaiʻi families are necessarily poor in wealth. Instead, they are often heavily concentrated in one form of wealth: land and real estate.

Compare that with wealthy families in larger Mainland economies or internationally connected regions. Many have diversified their fortunes into operating businesses that produce revenues well beyond their home markets — like consumer or food products.

A family business in California or New York can build factories, distribution networks or brands that sell around the world. A small country or region does not necessarily have to be a limitation.

Switzerland is an instructive example. With a population of only about nine million — roughly nine Hawaiʻis —globally recognized Swiss firms like UBS, Rolex and Novartis remind us that the size of a domestic market does not determine the potential scale of a business.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Hawaiʻi's challenge has been different."}]

Generations of Hawaiʻi families accumulated wealth primarily through land and real estate. That created long-term wealth, but it also created concentration.

A $50 million property portfolio is not the same thing as $50 million in cash, or a global operating company generating $50 million in annual revenue.

That distinction becomes especially important when a family owns a valuable property but needs capital to improve it.

Selling the property may conflict with family legacy, stewardship, future generations, emotional attachment, and long-term appreciation.

I recall sitting in the Castle & Cooke boardroom in the early 1980s and listening to the CEO discuss how the company owned thousands of acres of land but had difficulty finding the capital to develop it to its “highest and best use.”

If a major Hawaiʻi landowner with institutional relationships and access to Mainland credit lines could struggle to finance development, what happens to a family that owns a single Waikīkī retail property?

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"The issues are not theoretical."}]

One family member wants to renovate the building. Another wants a distribution. Someone else wants to buy a house.

These are not abstract questions of operations or return on investment. They are real family decisions being made today in Nu‘uanu, Mānoa, Hawaiʻi Kai and communities throughout the Islands.

The challenge for the next generation of Hawaiʻi families may not be creating wealth.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"It may be learning how to steward it."}]

The founder's philosophy — “Never sell the land” — worked remarkably well for a generation. Land provided security, income, appreciation, and family continuity.

But what happens when the founder is gone and the property passes to five children, 12 grandchildren and eventually 30 beneficiaries?

The circumstances change: multiple heirs, fragmented ownership, increasingly complex properties, capital requirements, redevelopment opportunities, and housing and community pressures.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"So the question evolves."}]

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":"Not: Should we sell?"}]

But: How can we make the asset more productive while preserving long-term family ownership?

How do we responsibly deploy what we have for the next generation?

Perhaps the next evolution is to think of family land not simply as an asset to hold, but as a form of Neighborhood Capital — capital capable of participating in the long-term development of the communities around it.

That brings me back to my two-decade frustration at the start of every Hawaiʻi vacation.

What happens when Hawaiʻi's greatest untapped economic asset is not the monthly visitor count but what already exists in family balance sheets across the Islands?

Most importantly, what could Neighborhood Capital mean for Kalihi-Pālama, a historically overlooked community strategically sited between the airport and Waikīkī, Hawaiʻi's economic engine?

If the capital and the land are already here, why aren't we seeing more large-scale, locally rooted development?

Perhaps Hawaiʻi does not have a shortage of capital, land, or expertise.

What it may lack is a process for bringing them together — patiently, professionally and at a neighborhood scale.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"textStyle"}],"text":" "},{"type":"text","text":" "}]

This is the inaugural column in Ray Tsuchiyama’s series exploring one central question: How does Hawai‘i use the wealth and land it already has to create its next economic future? He can be reached at 

Oahu neighborhoods homes i Stock

<title>Hawaiʻi’s next billion-dollar industry is not tourism — it is capital stewardship</title>

Everyday people in Hawai‘i are, collectively, sitting on a vast source of wealth, mainly real estate. As Guild Consulting's real estate and finance expert Ray Tsuchiyama explains, the Islands' next big challenge — and opportunity — could be putting this wealth to work at the neighborhood level for positive change.

Hawaiʻi’s next billion-dollar industry is not tourism — it is capital stewardship

De Soto 2025

DeSoto Brown

Hawai‘i History

There was a time when neon signs were all over the place in Honolulu, and indeed pretty much all over the world. Today they are rare to nearly nonexistent, and they mostly evoke memories of the middle decades of the 20th century. What is neon? What made it popular, and why did it go away?

First, scientifically, neon is a rare gas which is naturally present in a small amount in earth’s atmosphere; it was first identified as an element in 1898. A French inventor, Georges Claude, discovered that if pure neon gas enclosed in an airtight glass enclosure was electrified, it would give off a bright orange-red glow. In 1912 Claude’s company, using this technology, began manufacturing the first neon advertising signs. (Although known just as “neon signs” they did, in fact, use other gases as well to produce different colors.) After coming into use in France, the first such electric signs were displayed in the USA in the early 1920s (said to specifically have been by a Los Angeles car dealership in 1923), and Americans immediately took to these amazing and striking new lights that soon would dramatically alter downtown streets by night.

Initially, the Claude Neon company registered patents in the United States for specific processes that they used in their manufacturing process. From this fact they implied that they alone were the only authorized makers of neon signs and that all competitors were potentially in legal violation of their patents. In Honolulu, as neon was first promoted to customers in 1928-1929, two competing sign companies (with confusingly similar names) that represented two manufacturers mildly battled about this in their ads. The Electric Shop, licensed by Claude Neon through a California company, stated the former “controls the neon sign patents in America” and that customers must “Beware of Imitations.” Meanwhile the Electric Supply Company, agent for QRS Neon, said it would protect customers from claims of patent infringement if any such arose.

The Electric Shop was the first to offer neon signs in Hawaii, but under cumbersome restrictions. Such signs were not sold to customers but only could be leased for three years, requiring monthly payments, with the option to extend the lease at half price after that. Meanwhile the Electric Supply Co. boasted that it sold signs outright, which probably was more attractive to buyers. The Electric Shop started things off in a big way in February 1928 by installing 33 neon signs on both Standard Oil gas stations (13 of them) and Shell stations (20 out of the 88 then on O‘ahu). The latter were said to “sparkle with beautiful Neon signs by night” in a newspaper ad on May 1, 1928. By July of the following year, some of the Honolulu businesses with neon included the Benson Smith Drug Store, Manufacturer’s Shoes, Hub Clothing, Henry May & Co. groceries, and two of the Consolidated Amusements movie theaters. By the 1930s, the latter would be adding significant amounts of neon to their theaters’ marquees and facades.

Into the 1960s, neon would be a growth industry locally. For sign companies, neon could be financially lucrative since the fragile glass tubes that created the colorful glows required constant care and maintenance. Not only could these be broken, either by mistake or intentionally by vandals, they also tended to gradually flicker or go out completely through damaged electrical connections. Signs that blinked in successive patterns would eventually go out of whack as well. And since neon was almost always mounted high up on poles or the fronts of buildings, intentionally out of reach of the public, servicing it required climbing ladders or using other mechanical means of getting to it.

All this trouble meant that customers increasingly began to choose cheaper and less problematic signs made from plastic panels illuminated from behind by fluorescent light bulbs. And as these replaced neon, the exacting technique of bending the thin glass tubes into the required shapes of letters or other designs by holding them over a very hot flame like a bunsen burner was gradually lost by the experts who once had done this work.

During the 1930s neon was mostly perceived as being a colorful and lively part of urban areas, but by the late 1940s its reputation began to slip. In detective novels and Hollywood’s famous “film noir” crime dramas, neon instead began to symbolize the sleazy parts of cities where dangerous things happened and bad guys ran wild. In Hawaii specifically, neon began to be criticized in the 1950s. Don Beachcomber, restauranteur and eventual developer of the International Market Place, advocated that all neon be banished from Waikīkī since Kalākaua Avenue was “already taking on the aspects of any mainland street at night.” A visiting ad agency executive from Minnesota warned “... for heaven’s sake, don’t make [Hawai‘i] a neon paradise and over-commercialize it." A visitor from Connecticut wrote in a newspaper letter in 1956: “Everywhere neon signs! What has happened to the people of Hawai‘i that such desecration is permitted?” But at the same time a spokesman for a group of neon dealers countered that such signs “tend to aid crime prevention” (??) and that “many tourists have inquired why Honolulu doesn’t have huge sign displays like New York’s Times Square or Florida’s Miami Beach.” (Dubious).

In the end, it wasn’t a bad reputation that brought neon’s reign to an end; it was just cost, fragility and changing technology. A revival of interest and appreciation for neon began in the 1970s but this of itself was not enough to keep its use at the level of decades past. The incredibly specialized training necessary to bend the glass tubing into complex shapes stopped and those capable of doing it died off, and eventually LEDs replaced it with equally bright colors and even more changing patterns. While neon will, it’s hoped, always survive in some fashion, never again will Hawaiian skies be as widely lit by its glow as in the 20th century.

1 Neon montage ca 55 16x9

<title>Neon, its birth and death in Hawai‘i</title>

Bright, colorful neon signs debuted in the Islands nearly a century ago, with literal Hollywood glamor — the Waikīkī, Kūhiō and other movie palaces used them. Restaurants and small businesses of all kinds went for neon, too. Over time, they became associated with dive bars and the bad side of town. ASD history writer DeSoto Brown revisits and the highs and lows of this distinctly 20th-century form of advertising.

Neon, its birth and death in Hawai‘i

Daily Smile

[{"type":"text","text":"Swimming comes more naturally to some dogs than others..."}]

Smile 26 8 13

<title>Daily Smile: Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026</title>

Swimming comes more naturally to some dogs than others...

Daily Smile: Thursday, Aug. 13, 2026

Stephanie Salmons Headshot

Stephanie Salmons

Several new retailers and restaurants have recently opened at Ala Moana Center in Honolulu and more are set to open soon, the center announced Wednesday. Here’s what you should know.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"What's new:"}]

, a locally owned coffee roaster serving breakfast, lunch and craft coffee, has opened on Street Level 1 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

 can be found on Mall Level 2 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

Korean beauty retailer Lume Harmony can be found on Street Level 1 near Center Court.

, offering a selection of toys, plushies, collectibles, stationery, beauty essentials, home goods, fragrances, electronics, snacks and other accessories, can be found on Level 3 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

, an ear piercing and jewelry brand, has opened on Level 3 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Coming soon: "}]

, which will showcase contemporary works by local and international artists, is set to open this month in an 8,000-square-foot space on Street Level 1 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

, an indoor family entertainment venue and indoor playground spanning more than 42,000 square feet, will open in October on Mall Level 2 of the Mauka Wing. The space will have multilevel play structures, slides, an indoor zipline, trampolines and other play areas, along with amenities like supervised drop-off services, private party rooms, luggage storage and the Kids City Café.

, a modern beauty and wellness boutique offering a curated selection of facial and body spa treatments, personalized skin consultations, lash services, permanent makeup, Korean beauty products and more, will open this month on Level 3 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

, known for designer toys, blind boxes and collectible figures, will open its first Hawai‘i location this month on Level 3 of the ‘Ewa Wing.

, a luxury wellness and recovery destination, and 

, offering a modern take on traditional tea culture, are expected open in October. You'll find BB Wellness on Street Level 1 of the Diamond Head Wing and Molly Tea on Mall Level 2 of the Mauka Wing.

[{"type":"text","marks":[{"type":"bold"}],"text":"Relocations and renovations:"}]

 will reopen its expanded and newly renovated permanent location on Street Level 1 near Center Court in September.

 will relocate to a temporary boutique on Mall Level 2 of the Diamond Head Wing later this month, while its permanent location undergoes renovation. The newly renovated permanent shop is currently expected to open in late 2027.

Ala Moana Center opened in 1959 and is the world's largest open-air shopping center with more than 2.4 million square feet of retail space. It offers more than 350 stores and restaurants, including more than 160 dining options.

Ala Moana Center 052526

<title>What's new at, and coming to, Ala Moana Center</title>

The shopping center has recently welcomed a number of new tenants with more coming soon.

What's new at, and coming to, Ala Moana Center

Christinapic2

Christina O'Connor

Crime & Courts

Shortly after their son, Aidan Dungan, first went missing on Maui in 2019, Kaua‘i couple Laurie and Sam Dungan got a call from a woman offering to help with whatever they needed.

“She called to introduce herself and said 'I’m here if you need me,'” recalled Aidan’s mother Laurie, a teacher at Kaua‘i High School.

The Dungans quickly realized that it was more than just kind words; the woman really meant it.

“And then she just started doing everything in her power to find out what happened,” Laurie said. “She’s an angel.”

The woman on the other end of the line was Kimberlyn Scott, the mother of Carly Scott — better known by her nickname, Charli, a Maui woman who disappeared in 2014 when she was five months pregnant and whose ex-boyfriend was later convicted of her murder.

In the 12 years since her daughter’s death, Kimberlyn has become a tireless force dedicated to helping victims and their families through legislative advocacy, raising awareness about missing persons cases, and assisting families of the missing in on-the-ground searches on Maui — all as a volunteer.

Kimberlyn told Aloha State Daily that she never intentionally set out to do this work. Instead, she sees it as a natural progression of what she’s been through.

“It’s not like I woke up one morning and said I’m going to start doing all of this. … All of these things just organically meant to have me doing what I was doing,” she said. “There was kind of no way around it.”

In the years before Charli’s murder, Kimberlyn said that hers was a normal family — blended and large, but normal.

Kimberlyn initially moved to Hawai‘i as a kid with her parents from California and was raised between Hawai‘i Island and O‘ahu. They eventually returned to the Mainland, but she said she “never got Hawai‘i out of my system” and she later settled on Maui as an adult with her daughters, including Charli, who was a teenager when they made the move. When she married her husband, Johnny, together they had eight girls.

Kimberlyn was a self-described “neighborhood mom” devoted to taking care of her bustling household.

By early 2014, her two youngest girls were teenagers, while the rest were grown and out of the house. Charli was 27, holding down three jobs — at a salon, an arts center, and at a flower shop where she worked with Kimberlyn — as she prepared to become a first-time mom.

Kimberlyn said Charli was excited for the arrival of her baby boy, Joshua.

“She was thrilled, absolutely thrilled — she always wanted to be a mama,” Kimberlyn said.

One of the middle children in the large family, Charli, by her mother’s account, was warm, caring, and responsible — so responsible, in fact, that Kimberlyn often told Charli to look after her sister growing up, even though her sister was the older one.

“Charli was so stable and so reliable and just down to earth,

Things weren’t always easy — the family had its ups and downs, and relationships could be strained at times — but looking back, Kimberlyn said, life was simple in a way she didn’t realize at the time.

That simplicity was shattered on a Sunday evening, Feb. 9, 2014, after Charli left a family birthday celebration for one of her sisters.

When no one could get in touch with Charli the next day, Kimberlyn reported her missing.

A few days into the search, Charli’s burned vehicle was found near a remote surf spot, according to court records and reporting at the time, followed by clothing and other items belonging to Charli, and, finally, bone fragments. With that evidence, Maui police reclassified her disappearance from a missing persons case to a homicide investigation, and in July 2014, Charli’s ex-boyfriend, Steven Capobianco — the father of her unborn child and the last known person to see her — was indicted on a second-degree murder charge for her death.

Capobianco pleaded not guilty — he admitted he saw Charli on the night she disappeared, but claimed he called her for a ride to get his truck after it broke down near the Ke‘anae area and that he last saw her driving behind him on the Hāna Highway.

In 2016, after a trial that stretched on for several months, a jury found Capobianco guilty of Charli’s murder, as well as an arson charge for burning her vehicle in an attempt to cover up the crime. He was sentenced to life in prison.

The first time Kimberlyn got involved in another missing persons case was just a year after Charli’s death, in 2015, when a local man left his home one night and never returned. Volunteer organization Maui Search and Rescue coordinated a search, and Kimberlyn joined in on the effort. She was tasked with bringing food and water to the volunteers, and when she showed up with the supplies, organizers asked her to try to gather more information from the man’s family.

“They told me the family seemed really reluctant to answer [the questionnaire], maybe you can try,” Kimberlyn recalled. “And I was like sure, I’ll go try.”

The family recognized Kimberlyn — they knew she was Charli’s mother, and that opened up the conversation. She also had a sense of how to talk to them and what questions to ask.

The man was never found, but the experience made Kimberlyn realize her unique value in this type of scenario.

“People trusted me because I was Charli's mama. So they would tell me things they wouldn't tell other people,” she said. “It just felt like such a natural fit, like I was meant to be there.”

Kimberlyn, of course, knows the precise kind of pain that comes with having a missing loved one.

Immediately after Charli went missing, Kimberlyn and her family knew something was wrong — it was extremely out of the ordinary for Charli not to be in contact with her mother or sisters — but they clung to the hope that maybe she had just gotten in an accident and was out there somewhere. In those early days, Kimberlyn drove back and forth on the Hāna Highway, pulling over every 50 feet to call Charli’s name and peer into ravines for signs that her car may have gone off the road. Via social media, the family organized volunteer search parties that scoured the area.

Though Charli’s full remains have never been found, clothing with her blood on it, her skirt with nearly 20 puncture marks, and parts of her body — including her jawbone, hair, and fingertips — were uncovered within days of her disappearance, enough evidence to indicate that Charli was dead.

It wasn’t the answer anyone wanted, but at least it was an answer, Kimberlyn believes today.

“Because we found those things, we knew Charli was deceased. When I compare that to the situation that families who don’t know are in, it’s a pretty bizarre statement to say, but I feel lucky to know that my daughter is dead,” she said. “When I’m working with other families … I’ve felt like I am the sole survivor of a plane crash, it’s that kind of guilt, because I have answers and they don’t.”

Kimberlyn said she also is grateful for the community — hundreds showed up to help search for Charli, and the case garnered ample media attention locally and even nationally.

“We got so much help from the community and from the press,” Kimberlyn said. “There were so many people helping us. … And that doesn’t happen in every case.”

‘She was there for just anything we needed’

Over the years, Kimberlyn has helped bring attention to other missing persons cases by hanging flyers and using the original Find Charli Scott Facebook page — which has more than 8,300 followers — to raise awareness.

She’s also worked directly with dozens of families of the missing, assisting in everything from helping them navigate communication with police, to coordinating travel logistics for families coming to Maui to look for loved ones, to participating in on-the-ground search efforts. She also talks to family members to see if she can uncover any new information or identify gaps in the case.

“I let them know what information they need to have. I make sure that the families know to tell [the police] about specific things, like mental health issues,” she said. “I get them set up so that it’s easier for the police, too.”

In 2022, Dave Wyatt got a call that his 37-year-old son, Joey Wyatt, never returned home after a camping trip. Dave and his daughter immediately flew to Maui from their home on the East Coast to help with the search.

It was overwhelming — not only emotionally, but they were unfamiliar with the Islands and had no local contacts. Kimberlyn was a “godsend” through the ordeal, Dave said.

They were introduced to her through a friend of a friend, and by the time they arrived on Maui, she had already secured them a rental car, a hotel, and discounts at restaurants, and coordinated interviews with local media.

“We knew nobody. We knew nothing. We had no idea how to even start the process,” Dave said. “She was very instrumental in getting all the resources pulled together. … It was all organized and basically sitting on a platter waiting for us when we got there.

“We met with her and she gave us some insight on what the next steps were going to be, what we needed to do. She was there for just anything we needed. If we needed to talk, she’d make herself available.”

Joey was never found — his car was discovered near Nakalele Point, and Dave said it’s presumed he fell into the water and was swept away — but Dave said the search was so thorough that at least he feels he has a definitive answer in his son’s disappearance.

Kimberlyn said she has helped with many searches that do have happy endings — in one case, for instance, she tracked down a missing man and stayed with him until his family was able to fly over from O‘ahu to get him — though these days she said she is focused on helping families whose cases have gone cold, like the Dungans.

It’s been seven years since Aidan, then 23, who suffers from schizoaffective disorder, vanished from a sober living facility in Wailuku, and the Dungans are still looking for answers.

Laurie said that shortly after they first talked to her on the phone, Kimberlyn became their “point person on the ground.”

“She knows a lot of people in the community, so through her contacts she’d go to places to talk to people, asking if they have seen Aidan — things that we were not able to do from Kauai.”

Laurie said that having Kimberlyn involved in the search for her son has “meant everything” to her.

“She knows what it’s like,” Laurie said. “She’s faced the roadblocks, and she knows the pain—nobody knows what it’s like until you’ve experienced it. … You’re so lost at a time like that, so bewildered through that chaos. With grief like that, it’s hard to focus, so Kim was our focus.”

To this day, Laurie said Kimberlyn is the first person she calls when she wants to talk about Aidan.

“I’m so, so thankful for her and everything she does,” Laurie said. “I think if anybody is ever going to find out what happened to Aidan, it’s probably going to be Kim.”

Kimberlyn said she is in the process of creating case packages for families of missing persons designed to equip them with information about their case and their legal rights. Each will include case timelines and analyses, search maps, and information on any investigative technology relevant to the case, as well as a guide on how to access public records.

Kimberlyn said the goal is to give families tools to help move their cases forward.

“They become their own best advocates, and I want to make sure they know how,” she said.  

As legal proceedings got underway for Charli’s case in 2014, Kimberlyn said she came into the situation “as a lot of families and victims of crimes do — I didn’t know anything.”

So she dove into educating herself on the justice system, and as she learned more, she started advocating for legislation to address gaps she saw. She’s since advocated for and co-authored proposed legislation addressing issues that include child safety and constitutional protections for crime victims within the system.

Currently, Kimberlyn is drafting language for what she hopes will be two new bills, and she said she’s reaching out to state lawmakers in hopes to find sponsors for the proposals. 

The first is one she’s developing with the Dungan family that they’re calling Aidan’s law, designed to strengthen protections for missing persons with mental health and addiction issues, or who are experiencing homelessness, by establishing mandatory reporting timelines to national databases for such individuals, among other requirements.

Kimberlyn said the issue is important to her because many of the missing persons cases she has seen involve individuals with substance abuse issues and/or mental health illnesses.

“Some of the most vulnerable people who go missing in Hawaii are the least likely to have their cases handled with the urgency and visibility that could bring them home — and by the time a family realizes what happened, critical early days have already been lost,” she said.

The other is a no body, no parole law — similar to laws that exist in the United Kingdom and Australia — that would mandate convicted murderers cooperate with authorities to reveal the location of a victim’s remains in order to be eligible for parole.

This one is personal for Kimberlyn. Capobianco’s sentencing includes the possibility of parole, but he has never confessed to Charli’s murder — he continues to maintain his innocence — and her full remains have never been found.

“I don’t want to die with this undone,” she said. “I don’t want to leave it for my daughters to do. I want to do everything within my legal power to make sure that Steven spends every minute of the time he got.”

There are 298 missing persons in Hawai‘i as of this writing, according to the 

National Missing and Unidentified Persons System

, a database for missing persons cases throughout the country.

As Kimberlyn sees it, this means she has more work to do.

Under an umbrella she’s calling UnSolved Maui, Kimberlyn has a few new projects in the pipeline aimed at raising awareness about missing persons cases and providing resources for victims. UnSolved Maui will feature a podcast and YouTube series about missing people in the Islands that she said “is designed to represent each family’s loved one with dignity while making the full scale of what is unresolved in this state visible to the public.”

She’s also aiming to launch a nonprofit arm dedicated to serving families of missing persons and survivors of crimes through advocacy, investigative support, public outreach and other resources.

Kimberlyn is still based on Maui, but today also splits her time between Washington and California to spend time with her daughters and seven grandchildren.

Charli Scott was a Maui woman who was murdered in 2014 at age 27 when she was five months pregnant. In the 12 years since her daughter’s death, Kimberlyn Scott has dedicated herself to helping families of missing persons.

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ASD Staff

Reporter

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