Small waves lap at the sand. A 15-year-old boy lies face down, unconscious, and a group of young men take turns kicking him in the head. Then a shirtless man runs into the frame and punches one of the assailants in the side of the head.
The shirtless man is Kekoa Tamale, a 23-year-old lifeguard. By his account, he was sitting in his truck when he saw the beatdown, and he intervened to save the 15-year-old’s life, giving the boy a chance to escape. Then the group turned on him.
One clip shows Tamale seated, one hand pressed to his eye, while someone wrenches his head back by the hair. In another he is lifted off his feet and slammed into the shorebreak. A third, poorly lit, seems to show two men soccer-kicking him in the surf.
This all happened on the night of May 30 at Waialeʻe Beach on the North Shore of Oʻahu, at a spot locals call Dead Man’s Curve. By now, hundreds of thousands of people have viewed clips of the affair on social media.
Some facts are settled. Honolulu police have arrested five juveniles, and prosecutors have charged each with attempted assault in the first degree. A GoFundMe for the two victims has passed $100,000. But the kicks at the shoreline were not the night’s only footage.
Another set of clips shows a different scene: a moonlit stretch of sand, Tamale and a young man trading blows with five other young men, one of them in a gray balaclava, the fight ending with no clear winner. Tamale himself admitted he had a run-in with this group earlier in the evening.
Look at the edges of the clips and you see a larger crowd. More than a dozen people follow the fight with their phones raised. Girls shriek obscenities in shock. One tells the boys to stop, but nobody moves to stop them.
Afterward, Tamale and his companion flex for the camera. A bystander celebrates their triumph against lopsided odds in language I won’t print. During that celebration, a girl holds out a sphere of alcohol, cap off — by appearance, the berry cherry limeade flavor of BuzzBallz Biggies, 15 percent alcohol by volume.
A photo said to be from that night has made the rounds since: a dozen girls posing on the sand. One sticks out her tongue and raises both middle fingers, with what appears to be a champagne bottle in one hand. Three more raise their middle fingers, each using a hand to shield their face from the lens. When the violent clips went viral, one of the girls took to Instagram to explain that they had only come to the beach for a birthday party, and that they were not present for the beating.
A second photo circulated, this one of the alleged suspects. Pages like Stolen Stuff Hawai‘i crowdsourced their names. Sleuths posted their home addresses, then the names of their parents. The watching crowd at the beach never went home. It got bigger.
The comment sections offer two cures. Many say the boys need more lickins at home. Others say lock them up and lose the key. They’re right, up to a point.
Parents should parent. A 15-year-old has no business drinking on a beach after curfew. And punishing assault is the first and plainest duty of government — even those who want a small state would like it to enforce justice. In this case, prosecutions should be vigorous and penalties real.
The sword of the state is a terror to bad conduct, and the belt corrects behavior at home. But neither can supply what was missing on that beach. A young man who joins a mob to kick an unconscious boy in the head does not need adjustment. He needs regeneration.
That is the old Christian word for it. Scripture says we were dead in our “trespasses and sins,” following the course of this world, “by nature children of wrath, like the rest of mankind.” It is by God’s grace that we are saved through faith.
How does God change a heart? Not by handing down better rules. Through the prophet Ezekiel, He promises to take out “the heart of stone” and put in “a heart of flesh.” That is a transplant, not a tune-up. And His ordinary instrument for it is almost embarrassingly humble: people carrying His Word to other people, until the Spirit makes them live.
The boys who threw the kicks need Christ. So do the ones who filmed, laughed, or ran. So do the ones who shared, and sleuthed, and scrolled. Stricter parents and longer sentences can change what a man does, for a time. But they have never once changed what he loves.
Hawaiʻi has been here before. In the early 1820s the islands were ravaged by disease, drunkenness and dissolution. Out of that disorder, the Christian chiefess Kaʻahumanu, governing as kuhina nui, and the young king Kauikeaouli — Kamehameha III — advanced laws against drunkenness, gambling and violence.
Meanwhile, an awakening of Christian faith moved through the Islands. The laws did not produce the awakening. The awakening produced the laws.
I do not know how the courts will sort out the night of May 30, and neither does anyone posting about it. I do know what the beach is called. And apart from Christ, man is dead.
My prayer is that everyone on that sand — the beaten, the beaters and the watchers — would come to know Christ, and that His ambassadors on the North Shore would do what ambassadors do, and beg them to be reconciled to God.
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Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
