On a June afternoon in Liliha, police found a man walking the centerline of North Kuakini Street with blood soaking his white shirt. Police asked the man his name. “I’m Jesus Israel Black I!” he told the officers, according to court documents. “I’m a pedophile. It’s a conspiracy. I’m being framed.” He was not Jesus Israel Black the First. He was Joshua, the son.
An hour later, Joshua’s mother found Jesus, 70, lying bloodied on the floor of their Nalanui Street apartment. He was taken to a hospital and died there that night. The son had taken his father’s name and his father’s imagined guilt in the same breath.
It was the third case of its kind on Oʻahu in the past year. Last June, London Opendack was charged with attacking his mother and father with a hammer in their Waikīkī apartment. Court records show he had twice been found unfit to stand trial in earlier cases, and twice released. In December, Micah Auna was charged with murder. Police had found his mother’s body at the foot of the stairs in her Hawaiʻi Kai home.
Two of the three men reached for the same story. Auna told officers his mother had molested him and his cousin, so he “pushed” her. Black wore his father’s name and confessed his father’s imagined crime in one sentence. And on Hawaiʻi Island in May, Jacob Baker was charged with killing three elderly men — one of whom had let him harvest coconuts from his land. At one scene, police found “Pedofilio” written on a piece of scrap wood.
Opendack is the exception. His social media posts, still online, show a mind fixated not on predators but on mathematical patterns — number theory as private revelation. The fixation was not new. In a 2022 petition for a restraining order, an ex-girlfriend described finding a note in her driveway that looked like a math proof. On closer inspection it was math symbols arranged into nonsense. His erratic speech, she wrote, pointed to a severe psychological disorder.
Black’s mother told police her son had schizophrenia. He had stopped taking his medication earlier in the year and used medical cannabis instead.
A disturbed mind grabs whatever story its culture keeps nearest at hand. A generation ago, the paranoid man heard the CIA in his fillings. Today’s troubled young man, more often than not, finds a predator in his own house.
The fear is not irrational in itself — child predation is real, and our alarm about it is warranted. That is exactly why it has become the costume worn by delusion. Court records note that Jesus Black had ten prior convictions, and none of them were for anything like what his son alleged.
Scripture treats honor of parents as more than good manners. It is the first commandment, Paul observes, that carries a promise: honor your father and mother, that your days may be long in the land. The promise is civic, not merely personal. A society in which honor flows toward age is a society where the old die in their beds. Leviticus extends the same fabric past the household: rise before the gray head, honor the face of an old man. Baker’s alleged victims were not his kin. They were men old enough to be his father, living quietly in Puna.
The Mosaic penalty for striking a parent was death. That severity measures the weight of the offense against the created order. It does not tell a judge what to do with these particular men. The same tradition that gave us Exodus spent centuries separating the gravity of an act from the capacity of the actor.
One of these men was twice found unfit for trial, and twice released. Years later, he allegedly took a hammer to his parents. That raises a policy question for the state.
But the deeper repair happens where the state cannot reach: fathers present in homes, and congregations that do not send their disturbed young men out to the sidewalk. It depends on families that treat the commandment as livable rather than quaint.
None of us will do what these men stand accused of. But the commandment was not written for monsters. It was written for ordinary homes. The commandment covers the way we approach the father who repeats himself, the teacher talked over in class, the kūpuna left to manage alone. Honor frays at the small points long before it tears at the large ones. The extreme cases shock us because some of the old fabric still holds.
We can pray that God’s will be done and that young men would come to know this commandment. We still must do the part of the work assigned to us.
The commandment comes with a promise. Long days in the land are offered to us, if we obey.
Author Sterling Higa can be reached at hello@sterlinghiga.com.
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