HILO — The mother of a 36-year-old Keaau man suspected by police of raping two women and a girl described her son as an individual “who would help anybody.”
“He was a good boy. He’s a good man,” Suzanne Kita said of her son, Oran Charles Kita.
Oran Kita was arrested Wednesday on suspicion of sexually assaulting an adult woman and a juvenile girl Tuesday near Piihonua Falls above Hilo town, and alleged separate sex assault of a woman in 2011.
He pleaded not guilty Thursday to separate charges of first- and second-degree commercial promotion of marijuana, possession of marijuana and drug paraphernalia.
Hilo Circuit Judge Glenn Hara ordered Oran Kita to appear for trial at 8:30 a.m. April 11. Deputy Prosecutor Rick Damerville estimated trial would take four days and said the case is assigned to Deputy Prosecutor Kevin Hashizaki.
Kita was indicted Jan. 23, 2014, on the alleged marijuana growing charges and he was arrested Wednesday on a bench warrant issued with the indictment.
“The state’s information is that he has been outside the jurisdiction” of the Big Island, Damerville said, explaining why Kita wasn’t arraigned earlier.
Police say a search warrant was executed Feb. 9, 2011, at a home in the 15-1600 block 15th Avenue in Hawaiian Paradise Park. Officers reportedly confiscated 381 plants, 6.7 pounds of processed marijuana, 5.3 pounds of a “green leafy substance,” grow lights, a generator and “various other paraphernalia associated with marijuana cultivation” indoors, according to a police spokeswoman.
Kita’s attorney, Deputy Public Defender Patrick Munoz, asked the judge to grant his client supervised release, as recommended by a bail study.
“Mr. Kita would be allowed to live with his mother, who’s present in the gallery …,” Munoz said. “Additionally, Mr. Kita’s father is in hospice. … Mr. Kita is requesting supervised release so he would be able to … be with his father in these last moments of his life.”
Munoz noted the marijuana case was initiated in 2011 and said that case “is the only thing before us.”
Damerville said the state is “strongly opposed to supervised release” and requested Kita’s bail be maintained at $23,000.
“According to the investigation in the bail report, his mother didn’t know where he was living …,” he told the judge. “He had no employment for the last seven years, so he’s got no source of legitimate support. He’s a chronic user of marijuana. (The report) doesn’t say he’s got a (medical) marijuana treatment card. … And the number of plants that he had suggests he’s been a marijuana grower for a long time.”
Damerville added that in 2011, Kita “was a suspect in a sexual assault case, and his name was plastered all over the Internet in 2011 because the police were looking for him in response to that sex assault complaint, and were unsuccessful in finding him. And when they found him, the circumstances of arrest in this case is that there was another sex assault case.”
Damerville said Kita told interviewers for the bail study he was living with his mother and brother, both of whom said they didn’t know his whereabouts, and described him as “a high flight risk.”
Hara ordered bail be maintained.
After the hearing, Kita’s mother said he “had a medical marijuana permit” issued by a local physician. She said her son “had permission to grow his own plants and permission to grow plants for other people who couldn’t grow their own.”
She said her son has been diagnosed with Crohn’s disease, an inflammatory bowel disorder. The illness, according to the Mayo Clinic website, can lead to abdominal pain, severe diarrhea, fatigue, weight loss and malnutrition.
“None of the medications he had been prescribed had any effect,” Suzanne Kita said. “But the weed did. … Marijuana is the only thing that has eased his pain.”
She said her son was unable to work because of his ailment.
“He wasn’t smoking to get high. He was smoking so he would be able to eat,” she added.
Police also are holding Oran Kita on suspicion of the alleged 2011 sex assault, which according to police, happened Feb. 5 of that year in Hawaiian Paradise Park, as well as the alleged sexual assaults Tuesday, in which the alleged victims told police a man speaking pidgin accosted and abducted them near the Piihonua bridge, took them to a remote location and raped them.
A police spokeswoman said the victim in the 2011 case is an adult woman. Suzanne Kita described the accusation as “totally bogus” and said the accuser was “upset about something to do with” her son’s former girlfriend.
Oran Kita had not been charged with any offenses connected to the alleged sexual assaults as of press time Thursday.
Email John Burnett at jburnett@hawaiitribune-herald.com.