By
HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) - Court records filed last month explain what may have happened to the body of the 6-year-old Waimanalo girl who police said was murdered by her adoptive parents.
Isabella “Ariel” Kalua was reported missing in September 2021, according to Honolulu police, but Isaac “Sonny” Kalua and Lehua Kalua allegedly killed her a month prior, according to the records.
The child’s body was never found, despite hundreds of search hours by law enforcement and community volunteers.
The Kaluas were charged with murder, hindering prosecution and abuse.
Last month, the defense attorney for Lehua Kalua filed a motion to dismiss the murder charge because the indictment was incomplete, lacking key elements.
Attached to the motion were the grand jury transcripts of testimony by Isabella “Ariel” Kalua’s older sibling.
The sibling told the panel that in August 2021, Lehua put the girl in a dog cage and put duct tape on her mouth then went to sleep. Some time during the night, they woke to find the child was not breathing.
The older sibling said the Kaluas started going to different public beaches about every other day.
They “poured this green stuff into the public toilets” the sibling said. Lehua was washing dishes at the beaches, “pots and pans and... other cooking materials” that Lehua used.
When the deputy prosecutor asked what the sibling was doing while this was going on, she told the grand jury panel that she was the lookout, told to “watch if somebody’s coming.”
She said the Kaluas poured green stuff down the drains of the bathrooms after they were done.
“We were just horrified by what the survivors were subjected to,” said Randall Rosenberg, one of the attorneys for the siblings.
Rosenberg said the older sibling was apparently forced to assist “in disposing of the body.”
Another attorney for the other children, Trevor Potts, believed the green fluid was possibly acid.
Potts said the revelations about cooking and grilling items and then the disposing of those items in dumpsters are difficult, but said volunteers who searched for the child and others who cared about the child deserve to know.
“Especially the community of Waimanalo where this all took place,” Potts said.
The older sibling will likely be called to the stand to talk about this again during the Kaluas' trial, legal expert Victor Bakke said.
A hearing on the motion to dismiss the murder charge is set for April 14.
The Kaluas remain in jail without bail.
