Hilo man dies after assault on Operations Street, police investigate murder
A 57-year-old Hilo man died after a group assault on Operations Street, and police are now investigating the case as murder. Detectives are still piecing together who was involved.
Hawaii Island police are treating the death of 57-year-old Michael Alan Torres Jr. of Hilo as a murder investigation after officers found him unconscious with severe injuries from an assault on Operations Street.
South Hilo patrol officers were called at 5:11 p.m. on Saturday, May 9, to the 100 block of Operations Street, where several people were reportedly assaulting a man. When officers arrived, they found Torres unconscious and suffering from numerous assault-related injuries, including serious head trauma.
Torres was taken first to Hilo Benioff Medical Center and then airlifted to Queen’s Medical Center on Oahu. He later died from those injuries, deepening what began as a street assault into a homicide case that now spans East Hawaii and Oahu.
Detectives from the Area I Criminal Investigation Section responded to the scene and processed it for evidence. Investigators have continued to work the case as a murder inquiry, and police have not publicly announced an arrest or identified a suspect. Big Island news accounts described the incident as an affray involving several individuals, underscoring the challenge detectives face in sorting out who did what in the moments before Torres was struck down.
The case has put a familiar police question back in focus on Hawaii Island: who saw what happened, and who will step forward. The Hawaii Police Department says witnesses, family members, friends, and others in the island community are often its most important source of information in homicide cases. The department directs tips to the Unsolved Homicides Division and Crime Stoppers.
Hawaii Police Department also notes that Area I covers East Hawaii, with Hilo among the communities under that command structure. In a case tied to a public block in town and involving multiple alleged assailants, detectives are now relying on witness accounts and evidence from the scene to reconstruct the assault and determine whether additional arrests will follow.
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