Connect with us

Hawaii

Alleged Trump Gunman Was My Hawaii Pickleball Partner

Published

on

Alleged Trump Gunman Was My Hawaii Pickleball Partner


Before Ryan Wesley Routh allegedly became the second man to try and kill Donald Trump in as many months, he was something else entirely: A fiend on the pickleball court.

“He was a reasonably good player. He played really hard,” Bryant Schultz told The Daily Beast in a phone interview. “He was the only one out at the courts who would dive for the ball. Most pickleball players do not dive to make a shot.”

Schultz, 62, of Kaneohe, Oahu, played frequently with Routh, 58, over a period of several years as part of a loose coalition of residents who showed up at Swanzy Beach Park three mornings a week to get their pickleball on.

Both on and off the court, Routh was “always personable and good-natured,” Schultz said, as well as chatty, on friendly terms with many of the park’s regulars. Hard on himself when he made mistakes, he never chastised his partners. “Except for his own errors, he was the most mild-mannered player out there.”

Advertisement

Routh first appeared at the park after the worst of the pandemic had passed, Schultz recalled. “He never appeared to have a bunch of money,” he said. “He was often borrowing paddles. For quite a while, he played with a really chewed-up wooden paddle—because of his dive, you know.”

During a federal court appearance on Monday, Routh was charged with two firearm possession counts. He told the court that he had “zero funds” in savings and had no assets beyond two trucks in Hawaii, according to CNN.

It wasn’t totally clear to his teammates what Routh did for a living. Schultz heard that he “worked on building tiny houses” and would do odd-job repairs around the community, including on a local pier. “He wasn’t paid or contracted,” as far as Schultz knew, he said. “He just went out and made the surface safe for people to walk on.”

On his LinkedIn page, which remained live on Monday, Routh advertised his work with a company called Camp Box Honolulu, which he wrote builds storage units and “very simple housing structures for the less fortunate.” In 2019, a year after Routh moved to Oahu, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that he’d pledged to build tiny homes for Kalaeloa’s homeless community.

One thing Routh didn’t appear to be—at least on the pickleball court—was political.

Advertisement

“I can’t recall him ever talking politics,” Schultz said. He’d had no idea Routh had self-published a 291-page book last year in which he called for Trump’s assassination, criticizing the former president for his 2018 withdrawal from the Iran nuclear deal. (Authorities have not yet laid out a possible motive in Sunday’s assassination attempt.)

In a section apparently directed at Iran’s government, Routh wrote, “You are free to assassinate Trump as well as me for that error in judgment and the dismantling of the deal,” according to The Wall Street Journal. “No one here in the US seems to have the balls to put natural selection to work or even unnatural selection.”

Routh has a scattered political history tracing back to his time in his native North Carolina, where he registered as an “unaffiliated” voter in 2012. In his book, he groused that he was “so tired of people asking me if I am a Democrat or Republican as I refuse to be put in a category and I must always answer independent.”

On social media, he had professed support for Bernie Sanders, Tulsi Gabbard, President Joe Biden, and Trump, whom he disavowed in mid-2020.

“I and the world hoped that president Trump would be different and better than the candidate, but we all were greatly disappointment and it seems you are getting worse and devolving…” he tweeted that June. “I will be glad when you gone.”

Advertisement

Schultz and his fellow picklers were aware, however, that Routh left Hawaii for Ukraine shortly after the Russian invasion, intent on fighting for Kyiv.

With no military experience and a lengthy criminal record, however, Routh was rebuffed by the Ukrainian defense ministry, he told Newsweek Romania in an article recently unearthed by CBS News.

“My initial goal was to come fight… but I’m 56, so initially they were like, I have no military experience, so they were like, you’re not an ideal candidate,” he told the magazine. “So they said, not right this minute. So plan B was to come here to Kyiv and promote getting more people here.”

Routh spent some time in the city trying to act as an informal recruiter for Ukraine’s International Legion, and spoke to both The New York Times and Semafor last year about his efforts. But several foreign soldiers involved with the legion told Slate on Sunday night that Routh “was not associated with them, recruited nobody to the cause, and did little during his time in Ukraine aside from garner publicity for himself.”

In a statement to NBC News, a spokesperson for the legion said, “We would like to clarify that Ryan Wesley Routh has never been part of, associated with, or linked to the International Legion in any capacity. Any claims or suggestions indicating otherwise are entirely inaccurate.”

Advertisement

After failing in his recruitment efforts, Routh eventually made his way back to Hawaii, where he took up pickleball again. The last time Schultz saw him was around four or five weeks before the assassination attempt, he said. Nothing seemed out of the ordinary; it was just another day on the court.



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement
Click to comment

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

This site uses Akismet to reduce spam. Learn how your comment data is processed.

Hawaii

Demand, prices for local eggs skyrocket amid nationwide avian flu outbreak

Published

on

Demand, prices for local eggs skyrocket amid nationwide avian flu outbreak


HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – The hunt for eggs continues with an ongoing shortage in Hawaii caused by a nationwide bird flu outbreak.

With demand comes price increases. A new report from the Hawaii Department of Agriculture says the price for locally produced eggs jumped 28%, from $6.91 in 2021 to $8.87 in 2024.

Long lines formed outside Eggs Hawaii on Waiakamilo Road Wednesday morning with customers waiting patiently to buy local eggs.

Moanalua residents Bill and Lisa Sandusky said they went to Costco, Foodland, and Times in their search for eggs.

Advertisement

“Everywhere, name it. I can’t find anything,” said Lisa Sandusky.

Salt Lake resident Erika Guillory is a caterer, and says the egg shortage has impacted her income.

“I was looking for eggs, and I couldn’t make a cake for one of the events that I had this weekend,” she said. “I’m not making as much money with the cakes that I normally make, but it’s hard to make a cake without eggs.”

Eggs Hawaii has a one-tray limit.

Meanwhile, the state says the price for imported mainland eggs increased by nearly 52% from $5.50 to $8.35.

Advertisement

“The increase in local production of eggs has been closing the price gap with imported mainland eggs,” said Hawaii Board of Agriculture chair Sharon Hurd.

“The avian influenza outbreak on the mainland is another example of why food security in Hawaii is so important. Supporting local farmers and ranchers helps to ensure our food supply,” Hurd said.

While avian flu has been confirmed in Hawaii, officials say no Hawaii egg production facilities have been impacted.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Hawaii

Chilling details emerge after schoolmate arrested in Hawaii girl’s 1977 murder

Published

on

Chilling details emerge after schoolmate arrested in Hawaii girl’s 1977 murder


New DNA technology allows investigator better chance at solving decades old cold cases

Advertisement


New DNA technology allows investigator better chance at solving decades old cold cases

02:47

Advertisement

Former Hawaii lawmaker Suzanne Chun Oakland remembers arriving at school one morning in 1977 to an eerie buzz.

The 15-year-old had met up with girlfriends as usual before class at Honolulu’s McKinley High School when she learned a student named Dawn Momohara had been found dead on the second floor of a school building.

“I don’t know how we got word of it, but everything spread really quickly,” Chun Oakland said.

Chun Oakland didn’t know Momohara, who was 16, but the unsolved death has haunted her and other McKinley students and staff for nearly half a century. That was until last week, when police used advances in DNA technology to arrest a 66-year-old resident of a Utah nursing home.

The suspect, former McKinley student Gideon Castro, was scheduled to make an initial court appearance Friday before a judge in Salt Lake County District Court. He remained in custody Thursday with the bond for his release set at $250,000, according to Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office records.

Advertisement

Castro’s attorney, Marlene Mohn, did not respond to email and phone messages seeking comment.

Momohara had been sexually assaulted and strangled, police said.

dawn-crop-screenshot-2025-01-31-063751.jpg
Dawn Momohara

Honolulu Police


“I was just really sad,” Chun Oakland recalled earlier this week. “I think for our student body, of course there’s that concern that what if he’s still out there and he does it to somebody else.”

Advertisement

On March 21, 1977, shortly after 7:30 a.m., Honolulu police found Momohara dead. She was partially clothed and lying on her back with an orange cloth tied around her neck, said Lt. Deena Thoemmes, of Honolulu Police. A subsequent autopsy ruled Momohara was strangled to death, and the medical examiner said there were signs of sexual assault.

Details from more than four decades ago are fuzzy for 1967 McKinley graduate Grant Okamura, who was the school’s 28-year-old band teacher in 1977, but the morning Momohara was found has remained a core memory.

Momohara’s sister — one of his flute players — arrived at school that day not knowing her sister had been found dead, he recalled. The sister was called to the office and later walked into the band room, devastated.

“The other students were trying to console her,” Okamura said. “At that point, I couldn’t have band. How do you have a class? She just sat there crying.”

She didn’t return to school for weeks afterward.

Advertisement

He doesn’t remember the sister’s name. The Associated Press was unable to make contact with any possible relatives. Okamura said he met Momohara a few times when he let her into the air-conditioned band room to wait for her sister.

The morning before Momohara was killed, she got a call from an unknown male and told her mother she was going to a nearby shopping center with friends. That was the last time her mother saw her, police said.

Police released sketches of a person of interest and a possible vehicle described by witnesses as a 1974 or 1975 Pontiac Lemans. A witness reported seeing the car when he and his girlfriend drove through campus the night before Momohara died. The witness saw a man and the car on the grass near the school’s English building, Thoemmes said.

Police released sketches of a person of interest in Dawn Momohara’s murder.

Advertisement

Honolulu Police


The witness circled back around but the car and the man were gone.

Police were unable to identify a suspect and the case grew cold, though grief lingered over the campus.

Although police retrieved an unknown man’s DNA sample from the teenager’s clothing, they could not identify a suspect. Authorities would not develop meaningful leads in the homicide until decades later.

In 2019, cold case detectives asked a forensic biology unit to examine several items of evidence from the scene, including Momohara’s underwear. They were able to develop a DNA profile in 2020. Then, in 2023, police received information about potential suspects, two brothers who were interviewed in 1977.

Advertisement

Several days after Momohara was killed, detectives interviewed Castro, who graduated from McKinley High in 1976. He said he met Momohara at a school dance that year and last saw her at a carnival on campus in February 1977. Police interviewed his brother, who also met Momohara at the dance.

In November 2023, Honolulu police went to Chicago, where the brother was living. They “surreptitiously” obtained DNA from one of the brother’s adult children, Thoemmes said.

Lab findings excluded the brother as a suspect, but a DNA sample from Castro’s adult son, and later from Castro himself, proved he was responsible, Thoemmes said.

He was arrested last week at the nursing home where he lived in Millcreek, just south of Salt Lake City, on suspicion of second-degree murder.

Neither Okamura nor Chun Oakland remembered Castro.

Advertisement

Chun Oakland graduated in 1979 and grew up to become a Democratic member of the Hawaii Senate. She said Momohara’s killing bothered her over the years, especially when she would meet victims through her work as a lawmaker or as a board member of the nonprofit Sex Abuse Treatment Center, a statewide program provding services for sexual assault survivors.

Chun Oakland said she is grateful an arrest was possible even after all these years.

“I think the community in general, and our elected officials, they know the importance of trying to preserve the evidence that can someday be able to see justice for that individual or individuals,” she said.



Source link

Advertisement
Continue Reading

Hawaii

Flights disrupted at Hawaii airports due to severe weather, visibility issues

Published

on

Flights disrupted at Hawaii airports due to severe weather, visibility issues


HONOLULU (HawaiiNewsNow) – Travelers at Hawaii airports experienced delays and cancellations due to severe weather Thursday.

Hawaii News Now issued a First Alert Weather Day from Wednesday night through Friday morning as a strong winter storm moves through Hawaii.

A ground stop was issued for interisland flights statewide that essentially kept planes from taking off or landing for about an hour.

The ground stop continued at Daniel K. International Airport in Honolulu, which was ongoing as of 3:30 p.m., and applied to all interisland as well as inbound flights.

Advertisement

“Grounding was because of visibility,” said Hawaii Department of Transportation Director Ed Sniffen. “It was very difficult for for pilots to come into or leave Honolulu Airport because of the visibility due to the storm.”

Incoming transpacific flights were diverted to other airports, officials said.

This meant delays for travelers, some of whom had been waiting for hours to get to their intended destinations.

“Based on the satellites I was watching, it looked like we could actually maybe miss the the weather and get home before it hit too hard, but when we were on our way here, I could tell that there might be possibilities of cancellations,” said Pahoa resident Brittany Hutchins.

“Hopefully we make it to Kauai on time, because we have a rental car, hotels all lined up, so it would be a little inconvenient if things didn’t work out, but you know as long as it’s safe,” said Ninglu Weng, a visitor from Winnipeg, Canada.

Advertisement

Transportation officials say they’re coordinating with airlines on flight schedules to make sure things run as smoothly as possible.

They also say that travelers should be in touch with their airline for more information.

Hawaiian Airlines said travel waivers are available for guests traveling to/from Honolulu (HNL), Lihue (LIH), Hilo (ITO), Kona (KOA), and Kahului (OGG) between Wednesday and Friday due to the inclement weather.

Officials also said a power spike at Honolulu’s airport triggered fire alarms and blew out some circuits that needed to be reset.

Advertisement



Source link

Continue Reading
Advertisement

Trending