Kuuipo Surls-Kane, 33, had been homeless for eight years when a teenage boy attacked her under the dim glow of a quarter moon in the Hilo park she considered home.
It was shortly after midnight on Aug. 2 near the Moʻoheau Park bandstand, a haven for homeless people seeking shelter in downtown Hilo. A security guard who witnessed the mugging called 911. Police arrested a 16-year-old suspect, who they said had illicit drugs on him, and charged him with second-degree assault and a drug offense. He was then flown to a youth correctional facility on Oʻahu. Surls-Kane, knocked down by repeated blows, was transported by ambulance to Hilo Benioff Medical Center.
Over the course of a day, the assault spurred a series of events that would upend the fragile sense of security that Surls-Kane had in Hilo, where family members often checked in on her. Instead, she would find herself disoriented, wearing blue hospital scrubs, on the unfamiliar streets of Honolulu. Her family would declare her missing and, with limited means, set out on an improbable journey to find her.
The assault left Surls-Kane with injuries — a broken jaw and brain bleeding — so severe that the Hilo hospital flew her to The Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu. In Hawaiʻi, rural hospitals frequently transfer patients needing higher levels of care to better-equipped facilities in the capital…