Seniola Kafoa, left, during his sentencing in Hawaii (KGMB/YouTube).
A Hawaii man was sentenced to prison for taking a machete and slaying his wife”s lover, local reports say.
Seniola Kafoa, 47, received a 20-year prison sentence for the death of 53-year-old Sione Paletua, a father of seven, local CBS affiliate KGMB reports. A jury convicted Kafoa of manslaughter in May.
“Sentencing him to prison, Your Honor, is the only appropriate sentence in this case. It will send a message not only to the defendant, but to the people of Maui that you don’t get a pass to kill someone because your wife was cheating,” Prosecutor Frank Loyd said.
The incident occurred on July 20, 2024, on Maui. Cops said at the time they responded to the scene and were met by a man who led them to Paletua who was on the ground unconscious suffering from a severe injury to his arm.
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Officers applied a tourniquet to the arm and paramedics rushed him to a hospital. Doctors pronounced Paletua dead when he arrived. A witness told cops he saw Kafoa standing over his body before driving away in a Honda. Cops later found the Honda abandoned and then arrested Kafoa on a second-degree murder charge.
Prosecutors tried Paletua on the murder count, but jurors opted to convict him of the lesser manslaughter charge instead, much to the chagrin of the victim’s family.
“One day he will have to meet his maker, the man above, and he will have to answer to him on why he did what he did,” Paletua’s oldest daughter said.
She and her siblings lost their mom to cancer in 2011. Now they are without both parents.
“One of the main things that we will miss about our dad is just having that sense of security. We had already lost our mom, and just knowing that in this crazy world, we still had our dad at least,” she said.
Kafoa apologized to Paleuta’s family through a Tongan interpreter.
Circuit Judge Peter Cahill issued the maximum prison sentence under law.
“It is a horrific death under circumstances that sadly occurred, but the bottom line is, it did happen, and we can’t ignore it,” he said.
