No charges will be filed for a pair of Honolulu police officers who shot and killed a man after a vehicular assault in 2025.
On June 24, 2025, on a Mākaha driveway, a pair of police officers attempted to stop a vehicle driven by 38-year-old Iosua Stevens. Soon after, the officers’ car was in flames and Stevens was dead with a bullet in his head.
Honolulu Prosecuting Attorney Steve Alm announced Tuesday that an investigation of the incident found that the two officers acted in self-defense and that no charges will be filed against them. Unlike other such investigations into officer-involved shootings, Alm said this case was not an example of a “suicide by cop.”
“He brought his death on himself,” Alm said.
In 2025, Stevens was wanted by the police for multiple prior offenses. By the day of his death, he had four separate warrants for his arrest, with a collective bond value of $111,100. Alm said he had been charged with second-degree theft, first-degree terroristic threatening (i.e., making a threat with a gun) and promoting a dangerous drug in the third degree.
Police had attempted to arrest Stevens on those warrants throughout June. However, he was hard to find. One attempt on June 6 had ended with Stevens additionally wanted for first-degree assault on a law enforcement officer.
Alm said officers had contacted Stevens’ ex-wife to find him on two occasions that month with no success: all they learned was that he would ask his ex-wife for gas money periodically and that he drove a stolen Ford F-250, which Alm noted is one of the most common models of pickup truck on Hawai‘i roads.
Nonetheless, photos of Stevens’ vehicle were distributed to officers on the Honolulu Police Department’s Crime Reduction Unit. And on the afternoon of June 24, a pair of CRU officers — with six and eight years of HPD experience, respectively, with no reports of complaints against them — reported seeing a Ford F-250 matching the vehicle’s description turning onto Farrington Highway in Wai‘anae.
The officers followed the vehicle, attempting to identify the lone male they saw driving it. After following for a short period, Alm said the vehicle turned off the highway, eventually turning onto a dirt driveway off of Hana Street leading toward a residence in Mākaha.
At this point, the officers followed Stevens into the dirt lane before Stevens stopped. The officers also stopped and activated their vehicle’s police lights and siren; this would be a traffic stop as a pretext to confirm Stevens’ identity, the officers having observed the vehicle run a stop sign during their slow pursuit.
Stevens’ immediate reaction was to rapidly reverse his truck into the officers’ vehicle, a much smaller Nissan Altima. The truck continued to push against the car, driving it perpendicular to the road and starting a fire in the engine compartment.
According to the prosecuting attorney’s investigation, the officers, believing they could not safely exit their vehicle or safely remain inside, fired multiple times into the truck’s cabin. The truck stopped.
Stevens was found unresponsive in the truck’s cabin with multiple gunshot wounds. A medical examiner later found he had been shot three times — although seven bullet casings were found at the scene — with bullets lodged in his head and shoulder, and a third bullet having passed through his shoulder. No alcohol or drugs were found in his system. Stevens had no weapons, save for a machete stored by the truck’s driver’s seat.
Witnesses in their residences on Hana Street told investigators that they heard the collision, followed by gunshots, but did not directly witness the events, although one resident extinguished the police car’s fire with her garden hose.
Alm said that the officers’ actions — taken against a known multiple felon in the process of attempting to kill two police officers with a multiple-ton vehicle — presented a clear-cut justification for the use of lethal force. Despite the relative proximity of civilians, Alm said the officers had a close and clear line of sight on Stevens in the driver’s seat and the risk of injuring others was minimal.
Meanwhile, the two officers were treated for neck pain and bruising related to the car collision.
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