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I was all set to dig into some unpleasant political blogging when I got a surprise text from my old friend Julie Tangelder on Kauai. She and I went to high school together - Kapa’a High, Class of ‘88 - and were pretty close then; since that time, we’ve had curiously parallel lives even while never speaking to each other or exchanging correspondence until quite recently.

And amid the rapid-fire texting back and forth, came some unfortunate news; our former classmate (though he was a year ahead of us) Keoni Lucas died recently in a car accident in Santa Monica, California.

I didn’t know Keoni all that well, but, along with Julie (and another friend, Jeremiah Johnson, who died in a diving accident last year; I wrote about this tangentially here, and still have not managed to complete a much longer work in progress about him), we rode the same bus to school.

This was, mind you, quite a distance - about 25 miles, one way, from where Jeremiah and I lived in Hanalei, and at least 30 from where Keoni and Julie lived in Ha’ena. And given that there was such a distance involved, all of us on that bus got to know each other to some degree. The bus had a culture all its own, with various cliques (none of which I ever fit into, of course) - and Keoni was one of the The Beautiful People.

That is to say, he was not only stunningly gorgeous in appearance, but graceful in his movements - owing, in great part, to his already considerable experience as a surfer.

But unlike his close friend, the very differently gorgeous Lyon Hamilton (brother of the now quite famous big wave surfer Laird Hamilton, whom I wrote about here), he seemed relatively unselfconscious about his own beauty. He was simply radiant.

And now, I learn that from the North Shore of Kauai, Keoni had gone on to study filmmaking at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa, and eventually moved to LA to pursue a career in that industry (even while he remained active as a surfer, and helped start a clothing line).

Here is Keoni happily behind the camera recently in Bali (click through to Flickr for image attributions):

Now there are a great number of people in mourning for him. A memorial service attended by nearly 500 people took place in Malibu on Sunday, while a ceremony back on Kauai is now scheduled for Sunday, April 20th.

I won’t be there, of course (I’ll be lucky if I can scratch together the money to attend my 20th high school reunion in June), but I did want to post something in acknowledgment of his passing. And it seems fitting in doing to recognize some of the success he had begun to enjoy in the film industry, with this clip from his supporting role in the (hilariously titled) independent film, Pee Stains and Other Disasters. He plays the prisoner:

Rest in peace, Keoni.

__

Links:

• North Shore Kauai: Respected Kauai Local, Keoni Lucas, Dies in LA Car Accident (Note: this is a reprint of a Surfline article, but has section for comments)
• Kauai Garden Island News: North Shore surfer dies on Mainland (Note: Article gets details wrong, such as Keoni’s age; he was 38, not 35)
• Donate to Keoni Lucas Memorial Fund

Due to the United States government’s immigration and customs Securitate, a 14-day-old baby boy with a serious heart condition, whose life was supposed to have been saved by emergency medical care, is dead.

PAGO PAGO, American Samoa— American Samoa’s delegate to the U.S. Congress is calling for an investigation into the death of a baby at Honolulu International Airport.

Delegate Eni Faleomavaega has asked the Department of Homeland Security to begin an investigation into death of 14-day-old Michael Tony Futi last Friday.

The baby had been flown to Honolulu for emergency heart surgery. He died while detained inside a customs’ room at the Honolulu airport with his mother and a nurse.

—Associated Press (2008-02-15): Baby detained, dies in Honolulu airport; child had been flown in for emergency heart surgery, official says

The family plans to sue the federal government for compensation. They certainly deserve it. But if their case isn’t thrown out of court on the excuse of sovereign immunity—which is what will probably happen—then the unaccountable thugs who murdered this family’s baby boy still won’t pay a damned cent for what they did. What they’ll do, public servants that they are, is to help themselves to tax money to cover the pay-out, thus sticking the rest of us, who had nothing to do with their asinine security theater or their callous indifference to human life, with the bill.

Further reading:

• GT 2007-11-30: Oops. Our bad.
• GT 2004-04-07: Death and Taxes
• GT 2004-03-20: The War on Iraq One Year On: Countdown to Regime Change