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8-Sep-2025
Honolulu homicide - Love, lies, and little DNA
In January 2022, acupuncturist Jon Tokuhara was shot and killed inside his Waipahu clinic. The police believed the tragedy stemmed from a deadly love triangle. Surveillance footage captured a man in the area wearing a Quicksilver bucket hat. As the suspect fled the scene, he dropped the hat, later recovered by a passerby. That one seemingly minor item became the crucial link to the killer.
Cybergenetics analysts used TrueAllele to analyze the DNA recovered from the hat. The crime lab's DNA mixture interpretation protocols couldn't give an answer. But advanced TrueAllele computing assisted the prosecution, reliably connecting suspect Eric Thompson to the hat with a match statistic of 16.4 trillion. The error rate was one in 1.42 quadrillion.
In a 2024 pre-trial admissibility hearing, the defendant's lawyers challenged TrueAllele's reliability. They proffered specious claims, such as:
- Internal validation was required on the crime lab data.
- There was no known error rate on the DNA data.
- Cybergenetics shouldn't coauthor peer-reviewed articles.
- Source code was needed to assess reliability.
However, the facts, science and law weren't in their favor. On December 3, 2024, the judge ruled TrueAllele evidence admissible, affirming its scientific validity. The DNA results could be heard at trial. On February 25, the jury convicted Thompson of second-degree murder.