A hate crime lays bare Hawaii’s complicated race relations

ADVERTISEMENTGrowing up in the village, Alo-Kaonohi would “hunt, fish, farm, live off the land,” he wrote in a letter to U.S. District Judge J. Michael Seabright. “It was obviously a hate crime from the very beginning,” she said. Tiare Lawrence, a Native Hawaiian community advocate on Maui, said she doesn’t condone the attack but is deeply familiar with the tensions that permeate the case. ADVERTISEMENTAttorneys for Aki and Alo-Kaonohi say it wasn’t Kunzelman’s race that provoked them, but his entitled and disrespectful attitude. For the federal hate crime, prosecutors are asking for a sentence of about nine years for Alo-Kaonohi and six-and-a-half years for Aki.