Peter Boy Kema

Case background and investigation

Peter Kema Jr., known throughout Hawaii as Peter Boy, was born on May 1, 1991, and lived with his parents and siblings in Nanawale Estates on the island of Hawaii. He was 6 when he died. For nearly two decades his case was treated publicly as a disappearance, and his face appeared on posters across the state asking where he was.

According to Hawaii News Now, his siblings last saw him alive around June 1997, and his parents, Peter Kema Sr. and Jaylin Kema, did not file a missing-person report until about six months later. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported that the father told authorities in 1998 that he had left the boy with a family friend he called Auntie Rose Makuakane at Aala Park in Honolulu. No evidence that such a person existed was ever found.

Police reclassified the case as a homicide in 2000. In 2005 the state Department of Human Services released more than 2,000 pages of records, with redactions, documenting earlier abuse allegations involving the child, CBS News reported. The parents remained the focus of the investigation, but no charges were filed for years.

A grand jury indicted both parents on murder charges in 2016. Jaylin Kema pleaded guilty to manslaughter; CBS News reported that she was released after serving a year in custody. According to CBS News, one of the boy's sisters had told investigators that in the spring of 1997 she saw her mother trying to revive him and later saw him in a box. Prosecutors concluded that he died of septic shock from an arm wound that was never treated, an injury they attributed to abuse.

Peter Kema Sr. pleaded guilty in April 2017 to manslaughter and to hindering prosecution. Under the plea agreement he was required to show investigators where he had disposed of his son's body or to pass a polygraph examination about it. He took authorities to a remote stretch of the Puna coast and said he had put a box containing the remains into the ocean. Nothing was recovered, which prosecutors attributed to the passage of time and ocean conditions, and CBS News reported that he passed the polygraph.

He was sentenced to 20 years in prison for manslaughter, with a mandatory minimum of six years and eight months, and to a further five years for hindering prosecution, according to the Star-Advertiser. Peter Boy's remains have never been found.