The 42-year-old man who shot and killed the neighbor who rammed his house and shot and killed three women on Waianae Valley Road said he opened fire after the neighbor pledged to “kill ’em all.”
In an interview about the Aug. 31 incident with the Honolulu Star-Advertiser, Rishard Keamo-Carnate, 42, said he saw Hiram James Silva Sr., 59, ram the first two cars into the side of the house he lives in with his wife, Alison, their children and Alison’s mother on Waianae Valley Road.
Silva was driving a front-end loader stacked with fuel drums and was armed with an unlicensed AK-47 assault rifle and handgun.
“I thought he was done. Then he started going again, so I ran upstairs to grab my gun,” Keamo-Carnate said, noting the registered firearm was a 9 mm Glock handgun. “When I was upstairs trying to grab it and unlock it, that’s when I heard the gunshots. I was scared myself.”
More than 20 casings from Silva’s weapon were recovered at the Keamo home, where 23 people were hanging out at the time of the attack.
Silva “shot before he came out” of the loader, from the right-side door, after the collapsing porch roof of the home forced the driver-side door shut. Keamo-Carnate’s attorney, Michael Green, maintains that Silva was trying to get into the house, hold the occupants at gunpoint and set the home on fire.
Keamo-Carnate said that when he got downstairs he put cars between him and Silva and looked for him. Silva’s daughter ran into the Keamos’ driveway shouting at her father, Keamo-Carnate recalled, and yelled, ‘Dad, what are you doing? Stop!’”
“He (Silva) was saying, ‘They like come to my house. They think I playing. I going kill ’em all,’” said Rishard Keamo-Carnate, wiping away tears at times while describing the chaos. “As he was walking out … I just fired.”
Keamo-Carnate emptied his eight-round clip and went back upstairs to grab more ammunition and turn off the lights in the home to make it harder for Silva to identify targets.
“I didn’t want him to shoot anybody else because everybody was still scrambling around the property,” he said. “He was saying, ‘I going kill ’em all, I going kill ’em all.’”
After reloading, Keamo-Carnate saw Silva and opened fire a second time. Silva died of a gunshot wound to his torso.
“I remember telling her (Alison), ‘I going stop him,’” he said. “I wish I was more prepared for this. I was telling myself, ‘I gotta stop him,’ but at the same time I might not be able to come home after I do this. … I never thought I was coming home because I didn’t know what was going on on the outside when I was locked up.”
A Silva family representative did not immediately respond to a Star-Advertiser request for comment.
Alison Keamo-Carnate said that at one point before the fatal shots were fired, her brother-in-law confronted Silva, his daughter and his wife. Silva’s wife reportedly stood in front of Alison’s brother-in-law, trying to stop the shooting.
Silva ended up killing three of the five people he shot when the long-simmering dispute between the neighbors turned deadly.
The three women fatally shot were visiting the home for an annual Keamo family mahjong tournament.
The Keamo family had finished the awards ceremony and dinner and were winding down when Silva attacked.
Rishard Keamo-Carnate was arrested on suspicion of second-degree murder at 12:15 a.m. Sept. 1 and released pending investigation at 7:55 that night.
Prior to the killings, the Silvas and Keamos had been neighbors for more than 20 years.
The animosity between the families began in 2021, when a car leaving an illegal concert on Silva’s 19-acre property during the height of COVID-19 restrictions hit a car filled with Keamo family members who were returning to their property on the single lane they share with the Silvas.
Before that, Silva’s father, Jacob Frederick “Jake” Silva, and Alison’s father, Frederick “Freddy” Kauakahiokamakahikulani Keamo, were friends, after Keamo helped Silva through a difficult time after Silva was convicted in 1980 of killing his ex-wife in Nanakuli on March 23, 1980.
“My dad was a friend who helped him through all that,” said Alison Keamo-Carnate. “So I think the relationship that they had influenced Hiram’s relationship with our family. Even though it ended up this way, we never had problems with him despite him having problems with everyone else around us … until 2021.”
On March 23, 2021, amid the COVID-19 lockdown, Alison Keamo-Carnate wrote a letter to county and state lawmakers alleging violations of COVID-19 gathering rules, and a drunken driver leaving a concert on Silva’s property rammed head-on into her vehicle as she drove up the single-lane road she shares with Silva’s property.
The collision resulted in the driver attempting to flee, hitting another vehicle, a fight breaking out as the result of the second accident, and “hundreds of cars lined up revving their engines at a dead stop with no way out because the accident (was) on our one-way lane.”
“Before that we didn’t have problems with him. He came to our family parties, we helped each other. We used his machinery to do things on our property. We shared materials with them,” said Keamo-Carnate. “They were really different from us … and we just accepted them.” Rishard Keamo-Carnate remembers Silva attending his family’s Labor Day parties, playing cards with the Keamos’ family and friends. Sometimes when Silva lost while social gambling, he would storm off, and the Keamos would hear him discharging firearms in frustration.
They were accustomed to Silva’s behavior when he lost, and thought nothing of it.
“He’d lose money, and then he would go home, be upset and shoot (up in the air),” said Keamo-Carnate.
The morning after the party on March 31, 2021, Alison Keamo-Carnate said Silva saw a television reporter walk onto his property, as part of the reporter’s investigation of complaints about Silva’s unpermitted-structure parties.
Silva allegedly blamed the Keamos for calling the news media, an allegation the family denies, and threatened to shoot the family. The Keamos reported the threat to Honolulu police.
Honolulu Police Chief Arthur “Joe” Logan told the Rick Hamada radio show during his “Ask the Chief” segment Sept. 9 that officers did go to the Silva property in 2021 to arrest Silva for first-degree terroristic threatening, but Silva was behind a locked gate and using a different name.
Officers were unable to positively identify him as part of the process to establish probable cause for the arrest, Logan said on the broadcast.
The Keamo-Carnates “became a danger to … the money (Silva) was making, and that’s when he threatened them,” said Green, the Keamo-Carnates’ attorney.
After the threat, the families went their separate ways, and the Keamos “didn’t bother them … didn’t talk to them.”
“We were hesitant to go in (to their property Aug. 31),” said Alison Keamo-Carnate.
Aug. 31 party
On the night of Aug. 31, after seeing speeding up and down their shared lane off of Waianae Valley Road, Rishard Keamo-Carnate went to the Silva family to talk.
He walked into the “Silva Dome,” saw the partygoers, asked whose party it was and was then met by Silva’s daughter, he said.
“I said, ‘We’re tired of the speeding.’ And then I guess the mom saw us, and then she was saying, ‘What are you doing on our property?” said Rishard Keamo-Carnate. “I said … ‘The speeding gotta stop.’”
Keamo-Carnate said a verbal altercation started outside of the dome and that it lasted about 10 minutes.
“We deescalated it. … We said our apologies. They said their apologies and we went back home,” he said. “We were just hanging out … lying down in our ramp where our patio was. And then … you could hear a humming noise.”
When the Keamo-Carnates awoke, they said, they saw Silva entering their driveway with a front-end loader, and they could hear him swearing at their family.
No charges
In a Sept. 19 statement, the Department of the Prosecuting Attorney explained why prosecutors decided that no charges would be filed against Rishard Keamo-Carnate “related to the events at 85-1373 Waianae Valley Road, #C” on Aug. 31.
Prosecutors determined that Keamo-Carnate “was acting in self-defense and defense of others” when he fatally shot Silva after Silva “repeatedly drove a front loader through multiple parked cars and onto the center of the Keamo house/porch area, and shot five people, three fatally.”
The department noted that HRS 703-304 and 703-305 hold that the “use of deadly force is justifiable if the actor believes that deadly force is necessary to protect himself or others against death, serious bodily injury, kidnapping, rape or forcible sodomy.”
Under the same statutes, Keamo-Carnate was “not obliged to retreat from his dwelling” when confronted with Silva’s deadly force.
“The Department will also be moving to forfeit Mr. Silva’s front loader,” according to the statement.
Green said he will file civil complaints against the Silva family and the City and County of Honolulu to ensure the Keamo family gets “justice.”
