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The veteran Maui Police Department crime scene investigator and evidence specialist was driving back from a case in Upcountry, where fires had been raging much of the day. As he watched an eerie red glow flicker in the sky from the direction of Kula, he got an alarming call from the other side of the island.

“Lahaina is on fire,” a detective told Earles.  “This is not going to be good.”

Earles had been participating in mass casualty trainings for years, sitting around a table with morgue operators, military representatives, first responders and hospital staff to talk through countless scenarios: What would they do if there was an anthrax attack? If the roads got cut off to part of the island? If first responders got infected with a deadly virus?

A fire destroying the historic seat of the Hawaiian Kingdom was not something they had ever anticipated, but Earles knew from past training that if the fires were as bad as they sounded, Maui would need every resource possible to get through the days ahead.

After a mass casualty event, authorities must embark on a grim three-pronged task: search, recover, and identify the victims. That last step can take an incredibly long time. Two decades after the Sept. 11 attacks in New York City, medical examiners are still trying to identify the remains of more than 1,100 victims.

There was no way for Earles to know how many people might have died in the Lahaina fire, but early reports were ominous. Within 24 hours of the fire sweeping through the historic town, rescue workers had located 40 sets of human remains and more than 800 people had been added to an online missing persons list. Forensics experts to identify all the fire victims — and that some people might never be identified at all.

What happened next was unprecedented. By mid-October — a little over two months after the fire — police had identified all but one of the 96 victims recovered from the burn zone during the official five-week search for human remains. (Two sets of human remains were found after the search concluded and have since been identified, and three fire victims died in hospitals after the blaze.)

The story of how a small county police department that didn’t even have a medical examiner on staff at the time of the fires managed to achieve such a milestone is largely a story of science and collaboration. Incredible leaps in technology over the last decade, along with an enormous influx of volunteers from across the country, helped accomplish what would have been unimaginable just a few years ago.

It was a somber and hard-earned achievement, Earles said. Nearly every name that was added to the current list of 101 victims was the result of hundreds of hours of painstaking and sometimes gruesome work. Along the way, officers learned new skills and technology that could transform policing on Maui in the future.

Little Left To Identify

Local police agencies and small municipalities are not set up to handle mass fatality events on their own.

The forensics department at the Maui Police Department usually operates with a full-time staff of five. The police department’s morgue, located in a modest blue-roofed building in a mixed-used business district in Wailuku, can hold about 100 bodies at a time. The facility is usually at about 25% capacity.

The county would need more morgue space — possibly a lot more, Earles told Matson the day after the fire, placing an initial order for three refrigerated shipping containers that could be used for storing human remains.

And it would need a lot of help. Hundreds of search and rescue workers. Dozens of cadaver dogs. Scores of FBI agents to help figure out who might really be missing. Anthropologists, mortuary workers, X-ray technicians, forensic pathologists and detectives would all have a role to play.

The most pressing need immediately after the fire was recovering the victims.

Few people, unless they are specially trained or have experience in victim recovery, know what to look for after a serious blaze, says Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist and adjunct professor at the John. A Burns School of Medicine who responded to the Maui fires and has assisted with numerous mass casualty events, including the Sept. 11 attacks.

Many first responders expect to find a body — or at least a set of clearly human skeletal remains, Mann said. That is rarely the case.

When the Camp Fire tore through Northern California killing at least 85 people in 2018, Butte County asked the coroner in Sacramento to take over the task of identifying the victims.

The coroner’s department could do fingerprinting in-house and Kimberly Gin — who was the coroner at the time — said she expected to rapidly identify many of the fire victims with the press of an ink pad. Then, as body bags started arriving at the morgue, Gin quickly realized that would be impossible.

Most of the victims, Gin says bluntly, no longer had hands. Instead, coroners were opening body bags to find piles of bones  — sometimes tens of thousands of bone fragments for a single individual.

To make matters worse, burned bones are incredibly fragile and to the untrained eye can look more like coral or rock fragments than the underpinnings of human life. If there’s a lot of debris, it’s all too easy to walk right over a body — damaging what little remains.

Forensic anthropologists, whose work is centered on studying bones, were among the first responders to arrive on Maui, accompanying detectives and search teams with cadaver dogs into the burn zone to help look for victims. Using their expert training to help carefully distinguish what might be a bone from what was simply burned plastic or crumbled rock.

As teams searched for victims and tried to document critical information about their recovery, Earles worked to expand the police department’s morgue, cutting down weeds and filling in potholes in a vacant lot next to the forensic facility to create a secure, albeit makeshift space.

Contractors erected a tall temporary fence around the lot, using black cloth to shield workers from the public’s view. Behind the fence, portable shipping containers and popup tents were brought in to create temporary workspaces.

Then, working at three stations simultaneously, teams of forensic pathologists and anthropologists carefully began triaging fire victims.

In a few cases, that meant collecting fingerprints or using dental records to identify someone. But in many instances, that meant sorting through thousands of bones.

Burned bones may be fragile, but they still carry an incredible amount of information. With the right bone fragment, anthropologists can determine roughly how old someone was, Mann said, whether the person was male or female. Whether they had cancer. How long ago they died. And, if the fire has not burned all the way through the core, even a small bone can now hold the answer to someone’s identity.

Rapid Changes In Science

The story of how Maui identified the victims of the Lahaina fire at such rapid speed really begins two decades before the blaze erupted, when a doctor named Richard Selden found out that it took labs anywhere from six to 24 months to process DNA evidence from crime scenes.

A pediatrician with a background in molecular science, Selden was convinced that there had to be a way to speed up the process. He wanted to create a machine that would empower police to get results immediately.

DNA identification is essentially a three-part process: purifying the sample, amplifying the 27 regions of the human genome, and then figuring out how many repeats there are. It sounds relatively simple, but the process can take hundreds of steps — most of them completed manually in the lab, Selden said.

It took nearly a decade, but the company Selden founded was able to design a machine that automates all of those steps, spitting out a DNA profile in as little as 90 minutes. Several other companies have created similar rapid DNA machines, and their use has been proliferating since 2017, when Congress gave law enforcement agencies the authority to start using them. The machines, not much bigger than an office copier, are often called a “magic box” by police departments.

Selden had envisioned the technology being used to solve crimes, but he quickly realized it could also be helpful with mass disasters. The company’s first foray into disaster identification was in Paradise, California, in the aftermath of the Camp Fire.

Until recently, DNA has been considered an option of last resort for victim identification. Waiting months or years for a result, which may then need to be re-run, is torture for families in need of closure. That’s why Gin, the former Sacramento coroner, was horrified when she realized that she wouldn’t be able to identify many of the 2018 Camp Fire victims through fingerprints or dental records.

“I was really, really upset,” Gin said. “I thought, these poor families are going to wait like a year to get these identifications. And that’s just horrible.”

Then, Selden reached out. Gin said she was dubious that a machine could provide results in just a few hours, but she decided to gather some samples and give the process a try.

“Then when it started happening, it was like an ‘aha moment.’ Like the clouds parted and the sun shone right down on top of my head,” Gin said. “I said, ‘This is the answer.’”

Gin, who has since retired and is now a consultant for Selden’s company, ANDE, is an evangelist for the technology. She’s seen personally — in both the Camp Fire and the 2019 sinking of a dive boat that killed 34 people in California — how dramatically the machines can speed up the victim identification process. Nearly 90% of victims in the Camp Fire were identified by rapid DNA.

The machines are “science on steroids” said Earles. But even the most advanced technology in the world can’t provide a miracle on its own.

A Massive Collaboration

To organize the victim identification effort, Maui Police Chief John Pelletier — a no-nonsense native New Yorker who, as a captain in ​​the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department had served as incident commander during a mass shooting at a country music festival that left 60 people dead — moved quickly to mobilize a new team dubbed the Morgue Identification and Notification Task Force, or MINT.

Seated for an interview in a conference room at the MPD’s headquarters in Wailuku six months after the fires, Earles and Dr. Jeremy Stuelpnagel — a forensic pathologist who was slated to start as the county’s medical examiner in October but flew over almost immediately after the August fires — are a study in opposites.

Earles, a slender man with a silver goatee who pivoted to a career in law enforcement after working as a puppeteer and running a children’s museum, is an animated speaker. Stuelpnagel, who had been put through the paces as a pathologist working in the NYC medical examiner’s office during the height of the Covid pandemic, is pale and soft-spoken. Their tight rapport seems reflective of the one thing that both men said was key to overcoming the many obstacles that arose: a collaborative environment where everyone pitched in to get the job done.

“It was a very fluid leadership structure between Tony and I and others,” Stuelpnagel said. “It wasn’t like a pecking order hierarchy, because we didn’t need that. It was really just like co-running the thing.”

“Absolutely,” Earles said. “And the community really came in.”

While the task force waited for specialized equipment to arrive, the local hospital made a dedicated radiologist available around the clock to X-ray victims’ remains.

When it became apparent that people on Maui were reluctant to give DNA samples, law enforcement officers took the rapid DNA machines out to family resources centers and community meetings to demonstrate the technology.

After police officers figured out that one of the likely victims had no family who could give a DNA sample, they located a hairbrush that she had left behind with a friend on a recent trip to the mainland, using her hair to make the match.

Day after day, in two shifts from 6 a.m. to 11 p.m., 128 people from around the country — many of whom had never met each other before — worked with a laser focus on their mission: using whatever tools they could to give voice to the victims.

“We always approach any scene, any piece of evidence, any autopsy, with the dedication to not only the science — but also, we want this to speak for the dead person. And sometimes it’s only the science that’s going to provide the words to be spoken,” Earles said.

In the first week after the fire, the team had identified seven victims and announced the names of two: 74-year-old Robert Dyckman and 79-year-old Buddy Jantoc. By the end of the second week, they had identified another 32 people. At the two-month mark, they had been able to put a name to all but one of the victims recovered up until that point.

Hard News To Deliver

While forensic teams were doing the painstaking work of gathering DNA and sorting through bones to make sure that each set of remains was one human — and that the remains of that human were as complete as possible — police officers were talking to families again and again to gather any information that would help make an identification.

By the time a firm identification had been made and officers were dispatched to deliver the terrible news, they had usually spoken to the victim’s family multiple times, Stuelpnagel said.

Two of the officers assigned to the task force, Brad Taylor and Steven Landsiedel, were both, at various times in their careers, traffic cops — a position that calls for testifying in court more than just about any other officer. And they’d both had to make notifications to families after traffic fatalities. That meant they were used to being grilled and being the bearer of devastating news.

It was training that they both needed.

“The phrase, ‘Don’t shoot the messenger,’ it exists for a reason. You know, when you’re the bearer of bad news, sometimes you become the target of that emotion,” Taylor said.

After any tragedy, families are desperate for information. Beyond the most basic and urgent need to know whether loved ones are dead or alive, people are often tortured by questions about what happened to them. Were they alone? Did they die in the kitchen or the bedroom? Did they suffer? Did they die in their sleep or were they trying to escape?

Many of those questions were impossible for the police to answer. Officers could provide GPS coordinates for where people had been recovered, but often there was little left of a structure. No way to tell what had been the kitchen or the bedroom, because the building was totally devastated.

Taylor says the officers at the MINT were constantly communicating with the recovery team and strategizing about ways to be more specific, get better photos, find more info to help answer questions.

Some of the initial documentation of victim recovery “could have offered more context” and better details, according to a preliminary after-action report issued by the police department in February.

“It was really important to a lot of people. Every little detail we could provide in some way that helped them cope or comfort or fill in the blanks of what happened to their loved ones,” Taylor said.

Sometimes the officers got pushback when the stories that people had been told by eyewitnesses didn’t match the information provided by police. Taylor says he understands people’s anger and grief. And he gets why it’s hard for some people to believe that the number of victims wasn’t much higher than the 101 identified and two people confirmed missing.

The number of missing people was so high in the beginning, he points out — more than 3,000 initially — in part because people from around the world were calling to report that they hadn’t heard from even casual acquaintances who used to live in Lahaina.

“If they don’t know the back story, if they haven’t taken the time to look at the work we’ve done, then it kind of makes sense,” Taylor said. “They’ll say, oh, there’s 3,000 reported missing. Now the police are only saying there’s 100 and then they’ll just run with that.”

The Work Continues

A 15-year veteran of the force, Taylor did in-person notifications for nearly a quarter of the fire victims.

The work was hard. Both officers are prior military. Taylor says he’s seen a lot of bad stuff in his 15 years as a cop. Suicides. Fatal crashes. Dismemberment.

“This easily is the most challenging I’ve ever done,” Taylor said.

And yet, it’s something that he’s grateful for. It’s hard to imagine something that is more important, he said.

When the MPD chief announced in November that he was going to use the momentum of the MINT to create a cold case team — something he’d been talking about since arriving on Maui two years before the fire — Taylor and Landsiedel quickly volunteered. As hard as the work of victim identification was, Landsiedel said it was also something he had become deeply attached to.

“You learn the backstories. You learn a lot about these people. And so it’s almost like you become hanai family to them,” he said.  “You can’t just treat it as ‘Hey, I come to work today. OK, I go home.’”

In February, the duo found the 101st victim of the fire.

For months, Taylor and Landsiedel had been working to locate the three remaining people on the department’s list of verified missing people from the fire. They were certain all three men on the list were in Lahaina at the time of the blaze, and had found no sign of them since. Travel records showed they had not left the island.

One of the missing men was Paul Kasprzycki, a 76-year-old artist who lived in an industrial part of Lahaina.

People the officers interviewed had insisted that Kasprzycki had been home at the time of the fires, but multiple searches of the area where he lived had been fruitless. Then, they found out that Kasprzyck had a custom bicycle to help with mobility issues. They searched the burn zone again and again, looking for any sign of the bicycle. Eventually, they found a custom spoke outside a three-story building that had collapsed.

“Sometimes it takes three, four interviews to find that one little piece,” Taylor said.

But that’s the advantage of having a cold case team. They will keep returning again and again until they find what they are looking for.

If the search teams missed Kasprzycki’s remains, could there be more unknown victims in the rubble of Lahaina?

It’s possible, Taylor said. But if that’s the case, he doesn’t think the number is high.

“This had so much attention internationally, that if someone knew somebody that lived in Lahaina five years ago, they were getting reported,” Taylor said. And each case that gets reported is investigated.

Two people remain on the list of missing people from the fire, Robert Owens and Elmer Stevens, and the team is continuing to search for them.

Sometimes, people don’t want to be found. Officers have had to plead with people who are estranged from their families to call and let them know they are OK.

In January, a woman flew to Hawaii from Massachusetts and showed up at the FBI office seeking help finding her son. It turned out the man was transient and living on Maui and had simply had been out of touch. Taylor said they were able to find the man within 24 hours and reunite him with his mother — a rare happy ending in their line of work.

The MPD plans to purchase one of the rapid DNA machines used by the MINT. And the hope is that not only will Taylor and Landsiedel find out what happened to the last missing people from Lahaina, but eventually will find answers in other missing person’s cases. Close the book on unsolved murders.

“It’s time-consuming. It’s painstaking,” Taylor said. But finding Kasprzycki was proof that the cold case method works. “Yes. It’s not an overnight process. But the method works.”

In February, not long after the six-month anniversary of the fire, the police department began dismantling what was left of the makeshift morgue. Workers took down the fencing and removed all but four of the shipping containers that had been brought to the site in August.

Several large patches of yellow daisies had sprung up in the mostly vacant lot. The flowers, Earles pointed out, were growing almost exclusively where refrigerated morgue containers had sat for months.

MPD is still holding on to several sets of human remains, Earles said. They belong to people whose bones are intermingled with another victim in a way that makes it impossible to fully separate.

When family members died together, holding each other at the very end in such a way that their bones are essentially intertwined, surviving relatives have given the department permission to release the remains together.

But what happens when the people who spent their final moments so close together were strangers? In that case, the team has done the best it can to separate the bones through anthropology and DNA.

But when fragmented bone cannot be separated, it creates an ethical dilemma. When you can’t say if the bones belong to either victim with certainty, who should you give them to?

MPD is still not sure how it will eventually resolve that.

Civil Beat’s coverage of Maui County is supported in part by grants from the Nuestro Futuro Foundation.