A three-day manhunt across the remote volcanic landscape of Hawaii’s Big Island ended Thursday when a citizen spotted a man crouching in a field as cars passed, leading police to a small cave where Jacob Daniel Baker, 36, was arrested without incident in connection with the killings of three elderly men whose bodies were found at separate locations over two days.
A tip from a community member proved decisive. Hawaii Police Chief Reed Mahuna credited the arrest directly to civilian vigilance. “It was a citizen who saw something, said something and helped bring this manhunt to a safe conclusion,” Mahuna said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.
Baker was taken into custody in the Kalapana area on the island’s eastern side. Officers found him concealed in a small cave after he had been seen hiding in a nearby grassy area and ducking down as traffic approached on the road above him. He was arrested on charges including second-degree murder, burglary, and theft.
The three victims were Robert Shine, 69, and John Carse, 69, both residents of Pahoa in the Puna district, and an unidentified 79-year-old man found near Shine’s residence whose name officials were withholding pending formal family notification. Their deaths were caused three different ways. Shine died of strangulation. The 79-year-old man appeared to have suffered blunt force trauma. Carse died from what an autopsy classified as sharp force trauma. No firearm was involved in any of the killings.
Three Bodies, Two Days, One Suspect
The sequence of discoveries began Monday evening when officers found Shine partially submerged in a cement pond at a residence off Railroad Avenue in Pahoa. Investigators were initially unsure whether they were dealing with a medical emergency or a crime. An autopsy removed that ambiguity.
The following afternoon, just after 12:30 p.m. Tuesday, officers found the 79-year-old man dead at a home on Papaya Farms Road, only 400 to 500 feet from where Shine had been found. That same evening, just before 10 p.m., officers responding to a welfare check at a property on Kalapana Kapoho Beach Road, roughly 19 miles from the other two scenes, found Carse dead.
Mahuna said investigators believe the 79-year-old man discovered second may actually have been the first to die, a detail that reflects the difficulty of establishing a precise timeline across multiple isolated rural locations. Police said no connection between the victims had been identified beyond the fact that two of them lived near each other.
Warnings That Were Not Acted On
The arrests arrived days after a sequence of warning signs that, in retrospect, outlined a picture of escalating threat. On May 22, three days before the first body was found, two women filed separate applications for temporary restraining orders against Baker in Hawaii court. One application was filed by the owner of Josanna’s Organic Garden, a tropical farm on Papaya Farms Road — the same road where one of the victims was later found — who alleged Baker had threatened her life, the life of a disabled man, and three others on the property. She wrote that Baker was entering the property uninvited, taking items, making threats, and expressing intent to squat.
“I don’t feel safe,” she wrote. “He will enter our property and take items. Threaten us. Says he wants to squat there.”
The second application was filed by a friend of the farm owner who said she had come to stay on the property and found the other women had left because of Baker’s behavior. “He’s been intimidating the owner of the farm and threatening to harm her,” she wrote. “EVERYONE LEFT BECAUSE THEY DON’T FEEL SAFE.”
Both petitions were denied Tuesday — the same day the second and third victims were discovered. A judge ruled there was insufficient evidence in the farm owner’s filing to establish probable cause for harassment under Hawaii law.
Critically, the Hawaii Police Department was not notified about the restraining order applications, a police spokesperson confirmed. Mahuna said the last verified police call involving Baker dated to March, and the department was still working to understand why the restraining order filings had been made and what preceded them.
Baker was known to the community and to police before the killings. Court records showed he had 20 prior cases over two decades, most of them traffic infractions, and he had typically represented himself in those proceedings.
What the Neighborhood Knew
Multiple residents described a man whose behavior had been unsettling to people around him for some time. Stephen Shaffer said Baker had lived on his former wife’s property in Puna, where she grows fruit, and climbed coconut trees there for several months before she sought a restraining order against him. Shaffer described Baker as seeming angry and said others in the area shared concerns about him.
Donald Hyatt, who knew two of the victims and Shaffer’s former wife, said Baker had eventually left the cabin he occupied on the property in a state of disorder, leaving trash both inside and out. He said Baker later returned claiming squatter’s rights and renewed threats, and that Hyatt had personally encouraged the woman to seek legal protection.
Priya Surrago, a Puna resident, told CBS affiliate KGMB that she had encountered Baker once when he was selling coconuts near the highway. “He just had a creepy vibe,” she said.
A Remote Community’s Fear and Relief
Puna, on the eastern side of the Big Island, is a largely rural and relatively affordable district that has seen population growth even as lava flows from Kilauea have periodically consumed entire neighborhoods. Unpaved roads make parts of it feel more isolated than its distance from Hilo suggests. Many residents live in modest or improvised housing.
Tiffany Edwards Hunt, a Puna resident, said the three days of the manhunt represented something the community had not experienced before. She described a population that, because of the area’s remoteness and relative poverty, had little institutional buffer between them and the threat that Baker represented while he was at large.
“In that remoteness, you have lawlessness,” Hunt said.
Surrago described a community where people live close enough to know each other but where physical security is limited. “A lot of people around here, we just live very close in community and not even everybody even has like locks on their doors,” she said.
Deborah Davis was driving home when she slowed down near one of the victims’ properties and saw a police officer chasing a man running down the road. She stopped. “I just stopped and I’m thinking, ‘This is it. This is the guy,'” Davis told CBS. The man ran into a grass driveway and into the brush. After shouting and movement in the undergrowth, officers emerged with a shirtless man in handcuffs. Officers exchanged high-fives and shouted a celebratory phrase common in Hawaii. “They were very happy,” Davis said. “And I was very grateful. I was thanking them with tears in my eyes.”
Aumrae McCarroll said he watched Baker being taken into custody and felt the tension break. “I just felt so much relief in my whole body,” he said. “The whole experience was too close for comfort.”
Robert Shine’s daughter, Anon Shine, learned of her father’s death while hosting a birthday gathering, after a neighbor called her with firsthand accounts of what had unfolded nearby. She described her father as a farmer dedicated to biodynamic and Korean natural farming methods, and as a person whose death left her family in a state of grief she was still processing.
“I’m just still really in shock and just going through different waves of emotion and disbelief and sadness, looking at old pictures and just remembering all the good times and just what a light of love he was to so many people,” Anon Shine told Hawaii News Now.
Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda called the killings deeply impactful and said the arrest was “an important step forward towards justice and healing for everybody.”
Warnings, Denials, and a System That Did Not Connect
The restraining order filings that were denied two days before Baker’s arrest and were never communicated to police represent the most difficult element of this case for authorities to explain. Two women, in writing, told a court that a specific man had threatened lives on a property located on the same road where one of the three victims was subsequently found dead. Those filings went to a judge. The judge denied them. The police were never told they existed.
Whether notification of the filing, even without a granted order, would have changed what happened over the following days is impossible to determine. Law enforcement cannot act on denied court petitions. Officers cannot detain someone because a judge found insufficient evidence of harassment. The legal system’s thresholds for intervention exist for legitimate reasons.
What the sequence does illustrate is how the individual components of a community’s warning system, a farm owner’s fear, a court filing, a police record from months earlier, a neighbor’s observation that someone seemed angry, can each fall below the threshold that triggers a protective response while collectively pointing toward a person who would go on to kill three elderly men in two days.
Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Alameda said Thursday’s arrest was a step toward justice and healing. For the families of Robert Shine, John Carse, and the 79-year-old man still waiting to be officially named, the healing part is the longer road.
CBS/CNN
