KAILUA-KONA — The 57-year-old Kona man charged in connection with an Oct. 10 standoff with police was remanded to the Hawaii State Hospital and ordered to undergo a mental fitness evaluation on Wednesday.
Richard Denis Gorloff appeared in District Court for a preliminary hearing where his defense attorney requested and was granted the evaluation.
Gorloff interrupted Judge Cynthia Tai throughout the proceeding, first accusing guards at Hawaii Community Correctional Center of attacking him.
“I’m not going back to that place,” he said. He continued to tell Tai that he had to go home because his wife let the dogs out of his house and they were running amok in the neighborhood.
After it was announced that he would be transported to the state hospital in Honolulu, Gorloff said, “I want to bail out today. I just got to go to the Credit Union to get the money.”
Tai advised him to talk to his court-appointed attorney, Frederick Macapinlac, and suspended proceedings until a Dec. 18 hearing on the doctors reports.
Gorloff is being held in lieu of $14,000 cash bail in the Oct. 10 case. He is charged with first-degree terroristic threatening, second-degree terroristic threatening and violating an order of protection in connection with the incident.
In a separate, unrelated case, he is being held on $1 million bail after Circuit Court Judge Robert D.S. Kim upped the bail amount from $20,000 during a hearing Tuesday for a return on a warrant of arrest in connection with a prior reckless endangering and firearms case dating to early July.
Gorloff was free after posting bail in the July firearms case when he allegedly threatened to kill his ex-wife, and then, after police arrived, barricaded himself inside a Kona Coast View subdivision home on Oct. 10 setting off a nearly six-hour standoff with police that ended without incident.
Police were sent to Gorloff’s Ahulani Street home shortly before 9 a.m. that day after receiving a report from the man’s ex-wife that he’d threatened to kill her. Gorloff refused to exit his residence and reportedly told officers that if they came any closer, he would blow up the residence. Neighboring homes were evacuated and the Hawaii Police Department’s Special Response and Crisis Negotiation teams were deployed. Gorloff surrendered about six hours later.
Police charged him with the three offenses after his release Monday from Kona Community Hospital where he’d been confined since the incident.