LIHUE — An Arizona man pleaded guilty Monday to charges stemming from an incident in 2017, when he threatened two people with a meat cleaver he stole from Kmart, along with a watch and soft drink.
Gregory Labar was found unfit to proceed on the charges two years ago and committed to a state mental health facility, which he promptly escaped from the following month, according to court documents in his three pending cases.
Labar, 38, broke out of the Kahi Mohala psychiatric hospital in September 2017, after becoming agitated during a group therapy session, according to a written statement by a mental health specialist at the hospital who witnessed the incident.
“He spat at staff, kicked over a chair and broke through the mesh screen to the lanai,” the witness wrote in a statement to police. “He then climbed a tree, hopped onto the roof and proceeded in an unknown direction. He doesn’t have any weapons that I know of.”
Labar was on the lam for the next several months, until police identified him as the suspect in a purse-snatching incident.
On Jan. 22, 2018, an officer with the Honolulu Police Department responded to a call from a woman who said that a Caucasian male, later identified as Labar, walked up to her in the middle of the afternoon as she was getting into her car after work and started trying to yank her purse off her shoulder.
A brief struggle over the purse ensued, until the woman’s arm started to hurt and she let go, according to the HPD officer’s statement. The woman told police she started screaming for help and chased after the man, who fled toward a nearby movie theater, rummaging through her purse as he ran.
The woman told police Labar dropped the bag and ran away when a bystander grabbed his arm, but said that when she got her purse back, she noticed an envelope containing $3,000 was missing.
Police arrested Labar for robbery within an hour. He was indicted a few days later in Oahu’s circuit court, and eventually pleaded guilty to a reduced charge in a plea bargain that resolved three cases against him, including the one on Kauai that marked the start of his legal problems in Hawaii.
Shortly after Labar escaped from the mental hospital, his mother, Diana Labar, told a Honolulu Star-Advertiser reporter her son had been previously diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia and bipolar disorder.
According to the Nov. 22, 2017 article, Labar’s mother also said he had “threatened her and his sister with a knife on separate occasions, hears voices, acts aggressively and has been incarcerated for theft.”
Labar had originally been found incompetent to stand trial on the shoplifting and terroristic threatening charges, but because a panel of mental health physicians found him fit to proceed in subsequent cases on Oahu, the judge overseeing Labar’s Kauai case ordered a new examination of his mental capacity.
This time, two doctors found Labar mentally fit to proceed, effectively reinstating the criminal charges that had landed him in the state psychiatric facility to begin with.
He pleaded guilty in Kauai’s Fifth Circuit Court on Monday morning to two counts of terroristic threatening, both class C felonies, and one petty misdemeanor for shoplifting. He pleaded guilty last month in Oahu’s First Circuit Court to three class C felonies — one for escape and two for stealing the woman’s purse.
Labar is scheduled to be sentenced on Oahu in October and on Kauai in January. He faces between one and five years in jail for each of the felony charges, with the sentences to run concurrently.
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Caleb Loehrer, staff writer, can be reached at 245-0441 or cloehrer@thegardenisland.com.
I am just curious…who walks around with $3,000 in an envelope?
They should title it “man faces plea bargain and future crimes when he returned to society via a broken system”