Apparent ag theft encounter leads to police investigation

KAILUA-KONA — A group of prospective thieves didn’t exactly find low-hanging fruit when attempting to pilfer a tangelo tree on private property in the Kona Heights area last week.

James Resor, a 37-year-old homeowner and member of the Rotary Club of Kona, came home around 2 p.m. on the afternoon of Thursday, Nov. 8, after receiving a call from his roommate about a group of suspicious people on the property.

Upon his arrival, Resor said, he observed a woman who had hopped his fence and used his nearby ladder to scale the tree. He saw her picking “an obscene amount” tangelos and tossing them to two men who were standing below next to the open trunk of what Resor believes was a Honda sedan.

“They were essentially acting like an assembly line off a Ford factory,” he said. “Anything they could get their hands on. If it was ripe or it was ready, it didn’t matter.”

Resor’s roommate, a 25-year-old female, had left the scene earlier, and his wife wasn’t home at the time. Resor said in retrospect, he probably should have just called police and waited.

But that’s not the instinctive reaction when watching someone rob you before your eyes, he explained. So Resor confronted a man he described as a Caucasian transplant with a scruffy appearance.

“He came at me and said he would take whatever he wanted,” Resor recalled. “I have to protect my property and my wife, and even though it’s simple fruit and I’d rather just have walked away … I basically had to confront him and tell him, ‘No, you can’t take my possessions.”

At that point, he said, the altercation escalated. Voices raised and an altercation ensued, during which Resor admitted he struck the other man in the chin with his left hand as the man leaned in to attack him. The other man then reached into his pocket and produced a knife, continuing to pursue Resor, who fled up the street.

Resor outran the man in short order and while he didn’t flee the scene, Resor kept what he considered a safe distance of about 25 feet from the man wielding the pocket knife.

Resor then began shouting more loudly about the man with the knife to make sure his neighbors heard the conversation, both for their safety and in hopes they would call the police.

After a few minutes, the three fruit thieves jumped in the Honda and drove off. Resor subsequently called 911. An operator informed him police had already been contacted and were in the area looking for the vehicle.

Two officers stopped by, during which Resor overhead a communication indicating the thief had called himself in for producing the knife, alleging he had only drawn the weapon in self-defense.

Hawaii Police Department Maj. Robert Wagner confirmed the incident in an email to West Hawaii Today on Wednesday.

Wagner said Resor has filed complaints with HPD of terroristic threatening and theft against the other man. Wagner declined to name the other man, who he did identify as being 41 years of age, as no arrest has been made and the investigation is ongoing. Also, the man who pulled the knife has filed a complaint of assault against Resor.

HPD is completing its report on the incident, after which it will be forwarded to the prosecutor’s office for consideration.

Agricultural theft is a common practice on Hawaii Island, though typically agricultural operations are the targets, not homes in residential areas.

Because of that, criminals who engage in ag theft are notoriously hard to catch and to prosecute. Hawaii County hired a full-time ag theft investigator in 2017, a program that legislation introduced last session attempted to expand on. That legislation, however, died near the finish line.

Resor, happy to be safe and healthy following the altercation, said the irony of it all is that he and his wife frequently leave tangelos in boxes or sacks alongside their fence with signs indicating neighbors or people walking their pets should help themselves.

He took similar steps the day following the altercation.

“I woke up and thought, ‘I have to do something about this,’” Resor said. “So I went out and spent two hours that morning before work and picked hundreds and hundreds of (tangelos). … We picked it all and put up a sign that said, ‘Free Fruit.’ We had people coming by all day long and taking free fruit and thanking us. It was really cool and really special and kind of what it’s supposed to be, right?”