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Maui County
Crime Stories
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Maui County
Crime Stories
MOLOKAI -- COLD BLOODED OUTLAW EXECUTED IN HAWAII
Cruel Bandit Pays the Death Penalty for a Hideous Crime
Nervy to the Very Last - He Goes to His Doom Without a Tremor
Assists in Arranging the Harness - Other Murderers Soon to Stand on the Same Trap
Honolulu, Dec. 15, via San Francisco, Dec. 22 - Last Monday morning Noa, the native Molokai outlaw, paid the death penalty for the murder of a Chinese store keeper. The execution took place within the walls of the Oahn prison. Noa died without a perceptible tremor. Half supported by two guards on his journey to the gallows, he stepped with unfaltering step upon the death trap and, straightening up, he stood motionless while his legs were bound with a strap. He showed no fear when the noose was adjusted about his neck but rather assisted the guards by holding his head high. When the clergyman who followed the condemned man up to the scaffold commenced to pray Noa reverently bowed his head. The minister, with eyes closed and hands upraised, had not finished when one of the guards slipped the black cap over the murderer's head. Warden Low, standing in the court yard below, took out his watch. It was the signal. With a rattle and bang the trap fell and an instant after Noa's body hung dangling in mid-air. The crime for which Noa was executed was one of the most brutal and cold blooded murders in the criminal annals of the islands. Noa was the leader of a band of robbers and cut throats who made their homes in the Molokai mountains. For years they had terrorized the neighborhood. Noa would go to the greatest extreme to avenge a real or fancied wrong, cutting out the tongues of his neighbors' cattle, laying death traps for his fellow men in the woods and practicing other like cruelties. On the evening of April 7th, in company with two confederates, he broke into the store of Aauo, an aged Chinese, and terrifying the man out of bed beat out his brains with a stone. Heo Sheo, the store keeper's wife was choked into insensibility and left for dead. The thieves then ransacked the place, carrying off all the valuables and hiding them in the mountains. Noa was betrayed by a relative and captured, but afterwards escaped and the officers had a hard time to recapture him. He was tried here by Judge Carter and sentenced on August 18th last.
(Idaho Statesman, December 23, 1897, page 1 - Contributed by Peggy Thompson]
SAGATA & YOSHIDA
Swift justice has been visited upon the heads of the Maui murderers. Within the week Sagata and Yoshida have been convicted of murder in the first degree and sentenced to death. The Lahaina court has broken all records on murder cases, having disposed of three in a week's time. Sagata was charged with the murder of his wife and child and was caught red handed. Yoshida stabbed a Japanese woman to death with a knife and the evidence of his crime was just about as conclusive as that against his fellow countryman. Sagata will be hanged on the last Friday in March, 1898.
[Idaho Statesman, December 23, 1897, page 1 - Contributed by Peggy Thompson]
