One of the victims needed 13 staples to close the wound in his head after a massive fight broke out at the Kaanapali resort on Maui. Photos: YouTube//Screenshot
A family from California is speaking out after a huge brawl broke out on Friday night at the Kaanapali Alii resort in West Maui.
According to reports, the brawl left several people injured, including an older man that needed 13 staples to close the wound on his head after he was hit with a chair. Maui police told reporters from Hawaii News Now that around 30 people were involved in the melee. At least six of them were hurt badly enough to require medical attention.
At the time of this writing, only one person has been arrested. He is a 20-year-old from Makawao, a town known locally as Upcountry Maui. According to a family involved, the fight broke out after a group of local Maui youth confronted visitors on the beach.
“There were three females, one of which was the ringleader,” said family member Joseph Headfield. “She got up in people’s faces, said, ‘We’re going to beat up your boys tonight. We’re going to beat up the haole boys.’”
The family attested that two teenagers eventually asked their family for help, after which the group followed them back to the resort and began fighting with people in the resort’s barbecue area. While some of the resort-goers tried to remove themselves and their children from the area, the brawl’s intensity increased.
“She got up and just started screaming, ‘They’re going to fight. They’re going to fight,’” said a Headfield family member named Daniel. “As soon as I heard that, I got my son out of there. My wife followed me and a few others immediately got up and left the area. So I immediately took them out of the patio area. By the time I came back, I saw one individual just getting beaten up on the ground, defenseless, by multiple people. And maybe 20, 30 seconds later, they were all running away.”
The Headfield family thinks that the fight was motivated by race and needs to be investigated as a hate crime. “Our group consisted of ages from 85 to 11,” Daniel continued. “We were just not expecting any of this. We were on a private resort property, and we were just overwhelmed; completely, totally overwhelmed.”
Maui Police said that they are actively investigating the brawl.
