‘Grab And Go’: How Officials Seized A Fifth Grader To Live With A Father She Barely Knew …The case provides a rare glimpse of Hawaii officials’ immense power to remove children from their households, even without a court order.
Bella was sitting in her fifth grade classroom at Waikoloa Elementary and Middle School five days before Christmas in 2019 when the principal told her that her father was there to pick her up.
Bella was surprised, according to her mother Hannah David, and disappointed because she had been looking forward to the Christmas party that was about to start. But the man she thought of as her father, Michael Wine, who had been with her mother for nine years, surely had his reasons.
When she got to the school’s main foyer, however, she was greeted not by Wine, but by a man she barely knew – her biological father, William “Butch” Keahiolalo. Bella had seen him only once since 2012, when he agreed in court to give David sole custody of the girl.
A few weeks earlier, Bella and her mother had an encounter with Keahiolalo at a Kauai shopping mall that set in motion a series of events that culminated in what happened at the Big Island school that day. This included Keahiolalo allegedly approaching David, despite an order not to, and David’s arrest the following day for shoving and berating Keahiolalo at his workplace out of anger over the encounter.
