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At least 36 dead in wildfire in historic Lahaina, Hawaii, officials say
At least 36 people have been killed by a wildfire in the historic Hawaiian town of Lahaina, Maui County officials said late Wednesday night local time.
The Lahaina blaze was one of several that have devastated entire towns in Hawaii, initially spread by winds from Hurricane Dora as it passed far to the south on Tuesday.
The flames took the island of Maui by surprise, leaving behind burned-out cars on once busy streets and smoking piles of rubble where historic buildings had stood.
Officials said 271 structures were damaged or destroyed and dozens of people injured.
Zeke Kalua / County of Maui / Handout via Reuters
On Wednesday, crews were continuing to battle blazes in several places on the island. Authorities urged visitors to stay away.
The fires were the latest in a series of problems caused by extreme weather around the globe this summer. Experts say climate change is increasing the likelihood of such events.
As winds eased somewhat on Maui, some flights resumed Wednesday, allowing pilots to view the full scope of the devastation. Aerial video from Lahaina showed dozens of homes and businesses razed, including on Front Street, where tourists once gathered to shop and dine. Smoking heaps of rubble lay piled high next to the waterfront, boats in the harbor were scorched, and gray smoke hovered over the leafless skeletons of charred trees.
“It’s horrifying. I’ve flown here 52 years and I’ve never seen anything come close to that,” said Richard Olsten, a helicopter pilot for a tour company. “We had tears in our eyes.”
State Department of Education Superintendent Keith Hayashi said in a statement Wednesday that a team is working on contingency plans and preparing for the possible loss of an elementary school that had been in Lahaina for more than a century.
“Unofficial aerial photos show the King Kamehameha III Elementary campus – on Front Street in Lahaina – sustained extensive fire and structural damage,” he said. “The Department is striving to maintain regular school schedules to provide a sense of normalcy but will keep most Maui schools closed for the remainder of this week,” he said.
The Coast Guard said it rescued 14 people who jumped into the water to escape flames and smoke, including two children.
Among those injured were three people with critical burns who were flown to Straub Medical Center’s burn unit on the island of Oahu, officials said. At least 20 patients were taken to Maui Memorial Medical Center, officials said, and a firefighter was hospitalized in stable condition after inhaling smoke.
Richard Bissen Jr., the mayor of Maui County, said at a Wednesday morning news conference that he didn’t have details on how or where on the island the six deaths occurred. He said officials hadn’t yet begun investigating the immediate cause of the fires, but officials did point to the combination of dry conditions, low humidity and high winds.
More than 2,100 people spent Tuesday night in evacuation centers. Another 2,000 travelers sheltered at Kahului Airport after many flights were canceled. Officials were preparing the Hawaii Convention Center in Honolulu to take in thousands of displaced tourists and locals.
Mauro Farinelli, of Lahaina, said the winds had started blowing hard on Tuesday, and then somehow a fire had started up on a hillside.
“It just ripped through everything with amazing speed,” he said, adding it was “like a blowtorch.”
The winds were so strong they blew his garage door off its hinges and trapped his car in the garage, Farinelli said. So a friend drove him, along with his wife Judit and dog Susi, to an evacuation shelter. He had no idea what had happened to their home.
“We’re hoping for the best,” he said, “but we’re pretty sure it’s gone.”
President Joe Biden said he’d ordered all available federal assets to help with the response. He said the Hawaii National Guard had mobilized Chinook helicopters to help with fire suppression as well as search and rescue efforts on Maui.
“Our prayers are with those who have seen their homes, businesses, and communities destroyed,” Biden said in a statement.
Former President Barack Obama, who was born in Hawaii, said on social media that it’s tough to see some of the images coming out of a place that is so special to many.
Alan Dickar, who owns a poster gallery and three houses in Lahaina, said tourists who come to Maui all tend to visit Front Street.
“The central two blocks is the economic heart of this island, and I don’t know what’s left,” he said.
Dickar took video of flames engulfing the main strip before escaping with three friends and two cats.
“Every significant thing I owned burned down today,” he said. “I’ll be OK. I got out safely.”
Wildfires were also burning on Hawaii’s Big Island, Mayor Mitch Roth said, although there had been no reports of injuries or destroyed homes there. Roth said firefighters had needed to extinguish some roof fires and there were continuing flareups of one fire near the Mauna Kea Resorts.
The National Weather Service said Hurricane Dora, which was passing to the south of the island chain, was partly to blame for the strong winds.
About 14,500 customers in Maui were without power early Wednesday. With cell service and phone lines down in some areas, many people were struggling to check in with friends and family members living near the wildfires. Some were posting messages on social media.
Tiare Lawrence was frantically trying to reach her siblings who live near where a gas station exploded in Lahaina.
“There’s no service so we can’t get ahold of anyone,” she said from the Maui community of Pukalani.
Acting Gov. Sylvia Luke said the flames had wiped out communities and urged travelers to stay away.
“This is not a safe place to be,” she said.
Luke issued an emergency proclamation on behalf of Gov. Josh Green, who was traveling. Green’s office said he’d cut short his trip and was returning Wednesday evening.
Fires in Hawaii are unlike many of those burning in the U.S. West. They tend to break out in large grasslands on the dry sides of the islands and are generally much smaller than mainland fires. A major fire on the Big Island in 2021 burned homes and forced thousands to evacuate.
Yasso, who fled her home with boyfriend Kawaakoa, said residents are going to need time to regroup and that people shouldn’t plan to visit right now.
“It’s everybody losing their memories of growing up,” she said. “It’s the memories for everybody. We all lost our homes with this.”
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Alabama executed a man Thursday who admitted to killing five people with an ax and gun during a drug-fueled rampage in 2016 and dropped his appeals to allow his lethal injection to go forward.
Derrick Dearman, 36, was pronounced dead at 6:14 p.m. Thursday at Holman prison in southern Alabama. He pleaded guilty in a rampage that began when he broke into the home where his estranged girlfriend had taken refuge.
Dearman had dropped his appeals this year. “I am guilty,” he wrote in an April letter to a judge, adding that “it’s not fair to the victims or their families to keep prolonging the justice that they so rightly deserve.”
“I am willingly giving all that I can possibly give to try and repay a small portion of my debt to society for all the terrible things I’ve done,” Dearman said in an audio recording sent this week to The Associated Press. “From this point forward, I hope that the focus will not be on me, but rather on the healing of all the people that I have hurt.”
Alabama Attorney General Steve Marshall said Thursday that the execution was “in the interest of justice and finality for the families.”
“As a jury of his peers unanimously agreed, the gruesome facts of this case merited the ultimate punishment,” Marshall said. “Dearman viciously struck his victims with an axe, leaving them conscious and suffering for some time before he executed each at close range. Dearman showed no pity and no mercy.”
Alabama Department of Corrections via AP
Dearman’s execution was one of two planned Thursday in the U.S. Robert Roberson was scheduled to be the nation’s first person put to death for a murder conviction tied to the diagnosis of shaken baby syndrome, in the 2002 death of his 2-year-old daughter, but a judge granted a request from Texas lawmakers to delay Robert Roberson’s execution. The judge’s order was expected to be quickly appealed by the Texas Attorney General’s Office.
Dearman’s was Alabama’s fifth execution of 2024. Two were carried out by nitrogen gas. The other two were by lethal injection, which remains the state’s primary method.
Killed on Aug. 20, 2016, at the home near Citronelle, about 30 miles north of Mobile, were Shannon Melissa Randall, 35; Joseph Adam Turner, 26; Robert Lee Brown, 26; Justin Kaleb Reed, 23; and Chelsea Marie Reed, 22.
Chelsea Reed, who was married to Justin Reed, was pregnant when she was killed. Turner, who was married to Randall, shared the home with the Reeds. Brown, who was Randall’s brother, was also staying there the night of the murders. Dearman’s girlfriend survived. Turner and Randall had their 3-month-old son with them when they were attacked, but the baby was unharmed.
The day before the killing, Joseph Turner, the brother of Dearman’s girlfriend, brought her to their home after Dearman became abusive toward her, according to a judge’s sentencing order.
Dearman had shown up at the home multiple times that night asking to see his girlfriend and was told he could not stay there. Sometime after 3 a.m., he returned when all the victims were asleep, according to a judge’s sentencing order. He worked his way through the house, attacking the victims with an ax taken from the yard and then with a gun found in the home, prosecutors said. He forced his girlfriend, who survived, to get in the car with him and drive to Mississippi.
Dearman surrendered to authorities at the request of his father, according to a judge’s 2018 sentencing order.
As he was escorted to jail, Dearman blamed the rampage on drugs, telling reporters that he was high on methamphetamine when he went into the home and that the “drugs were making me think things that weren’t really there happening.”
Dearman initially pleaded not guilty but changed his plea to guilty after firing his attorneys. Because it was a capital murder case, Alabama law required a jury to hear the evidence and determine whether the state had proven the case. The jury found Dearman guilty and unanimously recommended a death sentence.
Before he dropped his appeal, Dearman’s lawyers argued that his trial counsel failed to do enough to demonstrate Dearman’s mental illness and “lack of competency to plead guilty.” The Equal Justice Initiative, which represented Dearman in the appeal, wrote on its website Wednesday that Dearman “suffered from lifelong and severe mental illness, including bipolar disorder with psychotic features.”
Dearman had been on death row since 2018.
In the hours ahead of his execution by lethal injection, Dearman had visitation with his sons, sister and father. He had a final meal of a seafood platter brought in from a local restaurant.
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