How Many People Does a Man Need to Threaten to Kill Before Police Will Bother to Listen?

One of the more frustrating things one so often comes across in media reporting on violent crime are expressions that offhandedly acknowledge that the suspect was “known to police prior to the killings.” Such a phrase, dropped into a piece of CNN reporting on the arrest this week of a man suspected of killing three elderly men in his community, happened to catch my attention, because it’s one of those phrases that implies an entire story happening behind the story. Put simply, the police don’t just “know” everyone. A person is “known,” in this context, because they’ve already been flagged to law enforcement before, either by their own actions/prior record or because people have been reporting that they are concerned about/frightened by the individual. In this particular case in Hawaii, as it turns out, multiple women also filed for restraining orders against the man in question, days before the murders took place … and those requests were denied, right about when the killings were taking place. Which all begs the question: What could anyone in the community have done any differently, to prevent this? How many reports do you have to make about a man threatening to kill people, before police bother to step in and protect anyone?

The suspect, 36-year-old Jacob Daniel Baker, was ultimately arrested on Hawaii’s Big Island yesterday after a manhunt lasting several days, found “concealed within a small cave” according to a press conference from Hawaii Police Chief Reed Mahuna, after a tip from a local who saw someone hiding in a nearby grassy area. At the same press conference, Mahuna said “We are confident that the suspect here is responsible or involved in all three homicides.”

Those deaths, sadly, were among some of the community’s older and more defenseless people. The victims were Robert Shine and John Carse, 69-year-old residents of Pāhoa on the eastern side of the Big Island, and a 79-year-old also found dead in the Pāhoa area who has not yet been publicly named. All are believed to have been killed within a 48-hour period, either by hand or via “sharp force trauma.” No firearms were seemingly used at all–we are talking about particularly savage, brutal killings here.

If only someone had put in warnings! But ah, never mind, the locals definitely did. Local news reporting in Hawaii News Now capture some of the Pāhoa-area residents talking about how Baker had displayed a history of frightening violence, breaks from reality and had threatened the lives of several residents in the area. As a man named Smiley Burrows is quoted: “We all had pretty much known that Jake, the suspect, had gone into a really severe schizophrenic, mental breakdown and got very violent on one of the farms where he was living down there, multiple days beforehand.” Another unnamed area resident said that Baker had been “having a lot of confrontations with the people that stay here. He was basically evicted… he had some odd behavior, like showing me his sword knife.”

Video surveillance captured Jacob Daniel Baker, 36, fleeing from multiple properties, officials said. Law enforcement found him hiding in a small cave. He was arrested without incident.

🔗: https://www.hawaiinewsnow.com/2026/05/29/triple-homicide-suspect-captured-victims-identified/ 

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— Hawaii News Now (@hawaiinewsnow.com) 1:55 AM · May 29, 2026

These incidents no doubt played a role in two women, days before the killings, both attempting to file restraining orders against Baker on May 22. One of the women, the owner of a tropical organic farm, said in her filing that Baker had threatened her life, and also threatened to kill a disabled man and others living on the property, which is on the same road where one of the victims’ bodies was eventually discovered. As she wrote in the petition, according to CNN: “I don’t feel safe. He will enter our property and take items. Threaten us. Says he wants to squat there.” A second woman living on the farm, meanwhile, also filed a restraining order request of her own, corroborating the first while saying the following: “I came to stay on my friend’s farm only to realize that the women left because this man was threatening to kill them. He’s been intimidating the owner of the farm and threatening to harm her. EVERYONE LEFT BECAUSE THEY DON’T FEEL SAFE.”

What was the police response, you might wonder? CNN notes only that “The Hawaii Police Department was ‘not notified’ about the applications for restraining orders,” according to a police spokesperson. The judge that the restraining order petitions were filed to, meanwhile, ultimately denied both of the petitions on Tuesday … which is the same day that two of the bodies of the victims were found, ruling that there was “insufficient evidence” to give probably cause for harassment by Jacob Daniel Baker. You know, the guy now under arrest for triple homicide.

I don’t know how you can read that and feel a sentiment that is anything but pure, galling exasperation–especially when you get to an elected official like Hawaii County Mayor Kimo Almaeda patting the police on the back for the arrests, saying that finding Baker represents “an important step forward towards justice and healing for everybody.”

This is not some triumph of exemplary police work: It’s a glaring critique of it. Jacob Daniel Baker, and men like him, are ultimately able to commit these kinds of heinous acts because warnings about them are routinely ignored and brushed aside, particularly when those warnings are coming from women, who are disproportionately likely to not be believed in comparison with men by both police and the judicial system. That’s how we end up with one in five reported sexual assaults being deemed “unfounded” by police, which naturally has a vast chilling effect on whether such crimes are reported by women at all, which only emboldens violent men that much more–a classic vicious cycle. And when a series of killings like this one in Hawaii does occur, is the initial police or judicial instinct to ask why they hadn’t stepped in earlier, or acted on the warnings that were received? No, it’s to congratulate themselves on the response to the crime, after three people have been killed.

If you’re a resident of this area, the only takeaway can be not that those dogged cops succeeded in getting their man, but that there’s no point to you taking concerns or active threats to those police in the first place, because they won’t do anything about it if you do. What, though, is the alternative, in a world where Batman is confined to the comics page? Who cares enough to step in, when a man is clearly teetering toward violence?