The daughter of a 49-year-old woman stabbed to death late last week in downtown Hilo said her mother was “an educated woman,” and media descriptions of her as a homeless person do her life and memory a disservice.
Chloe Caron said her mother, Danielle Caron, was originally from Pacific Palisades, an affluent Los Angeles neighborhood, but spent almost two decades in Santa Cruz., Calif., before moving to the Big Island a couple of years ago.
“She graduated from college with a master’s (degree) in teaching,” Chloe Caron said. “She’s talented. She’s artistic; she can draw. She has a genius IQ. She’s a loving woman with an addiction problem. She moved to the Big Island. I lived on Kauai for five years. I moved her out there myself to give her a new opportunity to change for the better. When I moved her out to Hawaii, I was with her for about a month, so I know that she was sober. For awhile, she was working on an organic farm and she was trying to pretty much survive.”
Chloe Caron said she last talked to her mother about a month ago.
“She said she was going back to school, and she was medically healthy, and mentally, she had overcome a lot,” the 23-year-old woman said in a Tuesday phone call from the San Francisco Bay area.
She said her mother, whose body was found early Friday morning in front of the Koehnen Building on Kamehameha Avenue, fell victim to “one of those ‘wrong place, wrong time’ kind of things.”
“When I read the news, it breaks my heart to read ‘homeless woman murdered.’ That’s not who she was,” Chloe Caron said. “She had a lot to give people. She was kind. She wasn’t a homeless addict who robbed people or anything like that.”
Until recently, Danielle Caron had an address in Pahoa, records indicate.
“She was originally living in Pahoa when she first moved to Hawaii. I’m not really too sure where she was recently. I know she had a boyfriend. His name was Brian (Trantham). She was staying with her boyfriend, and she was trying to go to Florida … because he had family there that was sick, and they were going to to there and take care of them. I don’t know if he knows (about the homicide), or where he is, anything like that.”
Apparently, Trantham did go to Florida. A Tuesday post on his Facebook page read, “How is it someone you care for is murdered 7,000 miles away, calls your name, and awakens you from a deep sleep, at the time of death?”
Curtis Hodges, a 35-year-old man from Shiloh, Ill., was arrested Friday at the Hilo Bay Hostel and charged with Danielle Caron’s murder. Surveillance video of the area led to his arrest, police said.
Hodges is incarcerated without bail awaiting a mental examination.
“It’s just callous. There’s no words; there’s no justification,” Chloe Caron said. “I will be going to the murder trial. I will be looking at that guy in the eye, and I will make sure that he’s locked up for life. If it’s the hardest thing I ever have to do, I will fight for her, and I will make sure this doesn’t go unnoticed or swept under the rug.”
Danielle Caron also leaves behind another daughter, Amber, and a grandson, Gavin.
“It breaks my heart,” Chloe Caron said. “The last thing I know, she was trying to pull her life back together and get herself a job and back into school and do whatever she can.
“She was more than a homeless woman. She was a beautiful, intelligent, educated, artistic, loving person. Everybody has problems. No one deserves that. I hope people can sympathize and support me and my family through this.”
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.