Dakota Briley was getting ready to teach a surf lesson at Chun’s Reef in June 2025 when he was run over by a car and suffered life-changing injuries. His family is now suing the City and County of Honolulu, the state of Hawaiʻi and the driver for negligence.
Briley was working as a surf instructor for North Shore Beach Boyz while he was home last summer from Point Loma Nazarene University. His father, Shawn Briley, is a 1990s Pipeline surfer, and Dakota Briley grew up at Sunset Beach.
Honolulu Police Department reported that an 18-year-old, identified in the lawsuit as Ikaika Viela, was driving west on the Kamehameha Highway at 1:31 p.m. on June 14, 2025, when the car crossed the road, drove onto the mauka shoulder of the highway and hit a 20-year-old male pedestrian, identified in the lawsuit as Dakota Briley. Viela and his 18-year-old passenger were not injured in the crash. Speed, drugs or alcohol did not appear to contribute to the collision, according to HPD.
Viela did not face criminal charges in connection with the collision.
Maj. Herbert Soria of HPD’s traffic division told ASD in an email Monday that the prosecutor’s office reviewed the case and declined to pursue charges. HPD declined to provide additional information.
A spokesperson for the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney declined to confirm that the office reviewed the case or proposed charges.
“The Department does not publicly discuss its charging decisions in matters where criminal charges have not been filed, including the reasons charges may have been declined. This practice protects the integrity of the investigative and prosecutorial review process, as well as the rights and privacy of the individuals involved,” the spokesperson wrote by email Monday.
According to the family’s attorney, Michael Cruise of Leavitt, Yamane & Soldner, Dakota Briley suffered a traumatic brain injury, multiple broken bones and a spinal cord injury that left him paralyzed from the waist down.
“It’s been a really hard time for him to go from an apex athlete to in a wheelchair, depending on others for basically everything,” Cruise told Aloha State Daily.
Dakota Briley was placed in a medically induced coma and spent weeks at The Queen’s Medical Center. He was transferred to Craig Hospital, a neurorehabilitation center outside Denver in August 2025.
Dakota Briley remains in outpatient therapy in Colorado and shared an update to the family’s online fundraiser in September.
“I’m continuing to focus on my recovery, rehabilitation, getting stronger, working out, and healing,” he wrote. “I know I still have a long road ahead of me, but I’m taking it one day at a time and continuing to have faith.”
Dakota Briley and his parents, Natasha and Shawn Briley, filed the lawsuit on Oct. 14. The case was assigned to Circuit Court Judge Taryn Tomasa.
Since the collision, the Briley ʻohana has spent more than $3.5 million in medical expenses, according to the lawsuit. Cruise said that the amount that the family receives will be determined at trial, adding that “the best outcome on this case is that Dakota gets taken care of. He’s going to need care every day for the rest of his life.”
“There’s no amount of money that could make him trade the life that he had for the life that he has now. It’ll never be enough, no matter what it is,” Cruise said. “Hopefully he gets enough to be safe, to be fully compensated, and hopefully this inspired the city and state to get serious about what they knew they were supposed to do.”
Cruise claims that the city and state have known for years that the parking area was unsafe and placed visitors of Kawailoa Beach Park and Chun’s Reef in harm’s way.
“This was obviously something they knew was coming and it came to the surface in a really destructive way,” he said.
Visitors of Kawailoa Beach Park, which is maintained by the city, park on the dirt shoulder of the state-maintained Kamehameha Highway.
Cruise said that the city has an obligation to provide safe parking to access public parks, and the state has an obligation to maintain the road shoulder.
“The city has an obligation to provide a reasonably safe place to park to access their very popular park and they just didn’t,” Cruise said. “For the state, it is their shoulder, and them allowing their shoulder to be used as a parking lot when they know that’s totally unsafe. They post no parking signs all along that area, but no one enforces them.”
The section of Kamehameha Highway is owned by the state and maintained by the city, according to Hawaiʻi Statewide GIS Program data. But to Cruise, the scope of the maintenance by the city and state is not clear.
Cruise compared the parking at Kawailoa Beach Park with the parking at Laniākea Beach, which is not maintained by the city as a beach park, about a quarter mile down the highway. Visitors parked on the shoulder of the ride prior to 2012, when the city and state opened a dirt or graven parking area on the mauka side of the highway.
The City and County planned to improve parking, add bathrooms and an outdoor shower area, and install a lifeguard tower at Kawailoa Beach Park, according to an environmental assessment published in 2005. The $2 million project would have added 80 to 100 parking stalls in a dedicated parking area on the mauka side of Kamehameha Highway, as well as crosswalks or blinking lights for pedestrians.
The report states that “existing problems” would continue at the site if no action on the proposed project was taken.
“Parking of vehicles along the roadside would continue in a haphazard manner, with rutted dirt parking on both sides. Pedestrian crossing of the highway would continue to be random and hazardous due to the obstruction of vehicles parked along the roadside and the lack of a crosswalk,” the report states. “This situation if left unchecked could pose a risk to health and safety.”
According to the North Shore Sustainable Communities Plan from 2011, improvements were planned to provide “adequate parking and related support facilities” at several popular beach parks on the North Shore, including Kawailoa Beach Park.
Cruise told ASD, “The city’s responsibility and the state’s responsibility came from their own statements, documents, studies that have gone back many, many years. They foresaw the danger, they easily could’ve prevented it and for reasons we will find out, they just never did. It would’ve been very easy to make this completely safe if that had just followed their own rules and their own studies and their own recommendations.”
Spokespersons for the City and County of Honolulu and state of Hawaiʻi declined to comment due to pending litigation.
Haley Lehman can be reached at haley@alohastatedaily.com.
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