KCCC inmates escape Sunday

LIHUE — Two inmates escaped Sunday from the Kauai Community Correctional Facility.

Isaiah Pongasi-Adric and Jeffrey Kelekoma Jr. were discovered missing from KCCC’s minimum security dorms during a headcount conducted just before 11 p.m., according to a Hawaii Department of Public Safety press release Monday morning.

Correctional staff searched the facility grounds and perimeter and notified the Kauai Police Department after confirming the two inmates had escaped, the news release said. According to police, Pongasi-Adric, 21, is 5 feet 7 inches tall and 170 pounds, and Kelekoma, 37, is 5 feet 8 inches tall and 220 pounds. Both men have brown hair and brown eyes.

The two fugitives were housed in a dormitory-style building on the KCCC campus, in the correctional center’s reintegration program, called Lifetime Stand. The DPS website says the program provides a structured, paramilitary regimen of marching, drill exercises, physical training, education, and community outreach. The program stresses discipline, perseverance, work ethic, and personal responsibility.

Two other inmates escaped from the same dorm in October 2017. It took nearly three days for police to track down both fugitives. Another KCCC minimum security inmate went on a crime spree after his escape in 2016, robbing a bank and committing a series of carjackings before being apprehended four days later.

Here is some background information on the two men who remain at large.

Pongasi-Adric was being held on $20,000 bail, while awaiting trial on charges of unauthorized control of a propelled vehicle and criminal contempt, after allegedly stealing a car in December 2018.

The 21-year-old Anahola resident has been in trouble with law enforcement on a fairly consistent basis for the better part of the last three years, according to court documents.

In December 2016, Pongasi-Adric allegedly escaped from a police who tried to arrest him on a warrant by punching an officer in the head while wearing one handcuff and running away following an ensuing scuffle. Pongasi-Adric picked up his second criminal charge in September 2017, when police stopped him for driving a car they suspected was stolen and allegedly found “multiple drug items containing methamphetamine” inside.

Later that year, he was charged with family abuse for allegedly grabbing a woman court documents describe as his “intimate partner” by the ears, pushing her down and hitting her in the face. He picked up a second family abuse charge about six months later for “pushing and punching” his girlfriend, a young woman who was then either 15 or 16 years old.

Those four cases, plus a contempt of court charge he picked up along the way, were resolved in a plea deal he signed last year. Prosecutors recommended six months in jail with credit for time served, a sentence Pongasi-Adric was given in April. But by that time he was facing a whole new charge for allegedly stealing a car in December.

The other escapee, Jeffrey Kelekoma Jr., 37, of Kapaa, was awaiting trial on nearly a dozen charges related to a series of physical and verbal assaults he allegedly committed against a woman in his home between mid-April and the end of May.

According to charging documents in the most recent case against Kelekoma — he has five cases pending, all but one of which involve allegations of family abuse — Kelekoma choked a woman in his home on several different dates throughout the month of May.

The alleged strangling incidents make up four of the six class C felonies Kelekoma is charged with. The remaining two felony counts — second-degree assaults — stem from altercations in which Kelekoma allegedly began abusing the woman with his tools, namely a weed whacker and a hammer.

Kelekoma faces six class C felonies, each of which carry up to five years in jail, and another five misdemeanor counts, all related to allegations that he beat and terrorized the same woman. He has spent the better part of the past year in and out of court to face charges almost exclusively related to assault or physical abuse.

He allegedly abused and threatened the same woman in March 2018 and again in November of 2018. In December 2017, he allegedly abused another woman in his home. That case is still pending.

If found, both men will face additional charges for escape, according to a Department of Public Safety press release.