The first sign that something was wrong in Honolulu that week wasn’t the screaming or the sirens. It was the smell.

On a quiet afternoon on Dole Street, not far from the University of Hawaiʻi at Mānoa, a worker glanced down into a storm drain and froze. There, wedged in the darkness where rainwater should have been the only thing that ever passed through, was a human body—badly decomposed, barely recognizable. The Honolulu Police Department responded, officers lining the 2600 block of Dole as orange cones and squad cars turned an ordinary city street into a sealed-off crime scene.

At first, investigators called it an unattended death. No ID on the victim. No obvious story. Just questions and the heavy, humid air of Honolulu pressing down on everyone watching. It was only after the autopsy that the truth cut through: the victim was a woman, and she hadn’t died by accident. She had been shot multiple times. What had started as a mysterious discovery in a storm drain on Oʻahu became a homicide case in the state of Hawaiʻi, United States.

No arrests. No answers. Just a city unsettled.

And for people living a few minutes mauka, deeper into the valley, the storm drain murder was not the only horror haunting them. They were still reeling from something even closer, something that hadn’t happened under a street but inside a house that looked like any other.

Because just up the mountain from Dole Street, in lush, rainy Mānoa Valley, another crime had already rewritten the way the neighborhood saw itself.

Mānoa, Hawaiʻi, has always looked like the kind of place bad things don’t happen.

The valley is a green bowl just outside Honolulu, where mist clings to the ridges and the air smells of wet earth and plumeria. Streets curve around old trees and tidy houses. Children walk to school with backpacks slung low. People wave from driveways, chat at mailboxes, rake leaves in yards that have seen generations grow up and move away.

It’s the kind of neighborhood where people lock their doors more out of habit than fear. Where the chaos of the mainland feels an ocean away. Where parents tell themselves, This is a good place to raise kids.

For the Oda family, it seemed like exactly that.

Paris and Naoko Oda lived in a modest home in Mānoa with their three children. From the outside, they looked like any other family trying to make it in Hawaiʻi’s expensive, beautiful, unforgiving economy. Paris was 46, educated, running his own chiropractic practice in Honolulu. Naoko was 48, a devoted mother whose life revolved around school schedules, meals, homework, and the thousand small tasks that hold a family together.

They had three children, each at a different point on life’s timeline.

Seventeen-year-old Sakurako was on the edge of adulthood, standing in that thin, electric space between high school and whatever comes next. She was thoughtful and bright, a girl who could have been anyone’s classmate in an American high school—studying, making plans, wondering what her future might look like.

Orion, at 12, was deep in the messy middle of middle school life. Old enough to argue, young enough to still carry the wide-eyed curiosity of childhood. He joked, played, tested rules, pushed boundaries the way boys his age do. He was still discovering who he was.

Nana, just 10 years old, belonged fully to childhood. Elementary school, friends, games, the safety of home, the small universe of her mother’s voice and the familiarity of her room. Her world was meant to be simple and soft.

Neighbors saw them as a normal family. They saw the kids coming and going. They saw Naoko in the yard, tending to plants, picking up deliveries, moving through the days with the quiet purpose of a mother whose first and last thought is always her children. They saw Paris leaving for work, coming back from the clinic, unloading groceries, living the life of a provider in a valley that prides itself on stability.

There were no flashing warning signs.

No police calls to the home.
No loud fights in the yard.
No reputation for violence.

Just a house in a valley. Just a family in Hawaiʻi.

But below that surface, something else was building. Not in the children, not in Naoko, but in Paris.

Money is often the thing people don’t talk about until it’s too late. Behind the simple façade of the Oda home, Paris was drowning in it—not in wealth, but in debt. His chiropractic business in Honolulu had begun to struggle. Unpaid taxes piled up, forming a shadow that grew longer with each passing month. Bills went unpaid. Letters came. The kind of official envelopes people dread opening.

To the outside world, he was still the chiropractor, the small-business owner, the father living in a quiet valley in the United States with three beautiful kids. On paper, it was respectable. But on the inside, the numbers weren’t adding up, and the pressure was cracking him.

By early 2024, his private conversations were starting to sound like distress signals.

To relatives, he said things that didn’t sound like the measured worries of a man simply stressed about money. They sounded darker. He said he would rather die than go to jail for his financial problems. He talked about shame. About not being able to face the idea of public failure, of his name attached to embarrassment and punishment.

Most chilling of all, weeks before the night everything ended, he told at least one person that he wanted to kill his family and destroy the house.

People who loved him heard those words and did what humans often do in the face of something unthinkable—they minimized. They told themselves he was just venting, exaggerating, blowing off steam. A person can say something horrific, and the brain will find any way possible to file it in a safer box.

He tried to get a gun. Investigators later discovered that in the weeks leading up to March 2024, Paris made efforts to obtain a firearm. For what? To hurt himself? To scare someone? To carry out the very threat he had voiced?

He failed. No gun. No clean break. Just the same crushing problems, the same dread, and fewer options.

To his children, none of this was visible. They moved through their days in the way kids do—thinking about school projects, friends, games, and the everyday warmth of their mother. They trusted their father. They had no reason not to. They were children. It was not their job to read the storm in an adult’s eyes.

To Naoko, the full scope of Paris’s crumbling finances may also have been partly hidden. She knew things were tight. She knew he was stressed. In a family, tension doesn’t stay invisible—it hums in the walls, it makes silence heavier, it turns small conversations into tightropes. But knowing someone is stressed is not the same as seeing what they are capable of when desperation hardens.

The days before March 10, 2024, in Mānoa looked ordinary.

The house was not extravagant, but it was home. Neighbors saw the same scenes they always saw: the kids going out, coming in; Naoko picking up groceries; the lights turning on in the evening as the valley darkened. People living nearby remember nothing that screamed danger. The valley was calm. Rain fell. Life in Hawaiʻi moved the way it always does—slowly in some ways, relentlessly in others.

On the night of March 9, 2024, the Oda house blended into the hillside like every other home. Lights glowed softly against the green. Somewhere inside, Naoko moved through the motions of a normal evening—making sure the kids were settled, checking on schoolwork, perhaps laying out plans for the coming week. Seventeen-year-old Sakurako might have been on her phone or finishing homework. Orion might have been gaming, watching something online, arguing with a sibling. Nana might have been brushing her teeth, getting into pajamas, asking one more question before bed.

Outside, Mānoa lay under a wide Hawaiian sky, the city of Honolulu spread out beyond the mouth of the valley. No one looking at that house that night could have guessed that within hours it would be the center of a story that would shake not just the neighborhood, but all of Hawaiʻi.

Sometime between 2:00 and 2:30 a.m., while most of the valley slept, something inside Paris snapped—or perhaps, finally settled into the decision he had been moving toward for weeks.

With no gun, he turned to something within reach in almost every home in America: a kitchen knife.

The exact sequence of what happened inside the Oda home that night can only be reconstructed from evidence—blood patterns, the positions of bodies, medical reports, and the faint echo of sounds reported by those living close enough to hear anything at all. Neighbors would later say they heard something—a disturbance, maybe raised voices—but nothing clear enough to send them to the phone in the moment. Hindsight always makes half-heard sounds sound like screams.

Investigators believe Naoko was attacked first.

At 48, she had been the anchor of that house, the protector of her children. Autopsy reports would later show defensive wounds on her hands and arms—marks that told a wordless story: she fought. She tried to push the knife away, to block the blows, to survive. Her last moments were spent not in quiet sleep, but in desperate struggle against the man she had once trusted completely.

The children bore those same markers.

Seventeen-year-old Sakurako, who should have been counting down the months to graduation, fought for her life. Twelve-year-old Orion, just starting to learn who he was in the world, fought, too. Ten-year-old Nana, still small, still baby-faced to the adults who loved her, raised her hands against a man she knew as “Dad” and tried, instinctively, to stay alive.

Their hands, their arms, told investigators everything they needed to know: they did not go quietly. They resisted. They tried.

By the time Paris turned the knife on himself, the house was filled with the heavy, unnatural silence that comes after chaos. Outside, the valley hummed with its usual nighttime noises—rain, distant cars, the faint rustle of leaves. Inside, five lives had ended.

Hours passed.

In the morning, as the sun rose over Mānoa and the light slid down the ridges, the first signs of horror seeped out of the Oda home—literally.

A tenant living on the property noticed something wrong. They had heard something earlier—an argument maybe, or noise that didn’t fit the usual pattern of the house. Now, in the morning light, they saw blood seeping under or around a door where no blood should ever be.

Alarmed, they called 911.

Around 8:30 a.m., officers from the Honolulu Police Department arrived at the property. From the exterior, everything looked quiet. No broken windows. No obvious sign of forced entry. No one answering the door. The report from the tenant was disturbing, but the law is a blunt instrument. Without clear grounds to force their way inside, officers had to weigh the situation against legal limits. They knocked. They waited. They assessed.

And then they left.

That decision would become one of the haunting points in the story.

It wasn’t long before a second call came.

Shortly after 9:00 a.m., another report reached HPD—more concern, more certainty that something terrible had happened inside that house. The details were bad enough that this time, hesitation evaporated. Officers returned determined to get in.

When they finally crossed the threshold of the Oda home, the scene that greeted them was one that seasoned investigators would later say they would never forget.

There would be no graphic descriptions in public reports, no need. The basic facts were devastating enough.

Naoko and the three children were found in different rooms, all dead, all the victims of multiple stab wounds. Their bodies and the defensive injuries on their hands and arms confirmed everything crime scene investigators already suspected: it had been a night of terror, of struggle, of betrayal inside a home that should have been a sanctuary.

Paris was there as well, dead from self-inflicted wounds. The knife lay nearby, his final act completed.

Even for officers used to death, it was too much. These weren’t anonymous adults in a bar fight. They weren’t gang members in a street shooting. They were a mother and three school-aged children in a quiet Honolulu neighborhood, killed not by a stranger, but by the person who should have been their guardian.

Outside, the narrow street filled with patrol cars, ambulances, and then cameras. Yellow tape fluttered in the trade winds. Neighbors stood on sidewalks, arms folded, hands over mouths, watching as a home they had driven past every day was transformed into a crime scene they could never unsee.

News traveled fast.

Hawaiʻi News Now. The Honolulu Star-Advertiser. National outlets on the mainland. The headlines spread across the United States: Family of five found dead in Mānoa, Honolulu. Murder-suicide rocks quiet Hawaiʻi neighborhood. Devastating family tragedy in valley community.

Press conferences were called. Honolulu police confirmed what rumors had already started to say: 46-year-old chiropractor Paris Oda had killed his wife Naoko and their three children—17-year-old Sakurako, 12-year-old Orion, and 10-year-old Nana—before taking his own life.

Autopsies confirmed the cause of death for each: multiple stab wounds. Investigators spoke carefully, but they acknowledged defensive injuries on the victims—evidence that the children and their mother had tried, even briefly, to protect themselves. It was, officers admitted, one of the most disturbing scenes some of them had ever walked into.

While forensic teams moved in and out of the house, collecting evidence, bagging items, photographing every angle, detectives turned to the question that everyone in Hawaiʻi was already wrestling with:

Why?

They went through Paris’s finances. What they found painted a picture that was less a sudden break and more a slow collapse. Unpaid taxes dating back years. Business revenues that had dropped. Pressure that had quietly intensified until it became unbearable. To friends and family, Paris had begun to speak more openly in February 2024, just weeks before the murders, about his fear of going to prison over tax debts. He said, more than once, that he would rather die than face that fate.

And then there was the statement that took on a horrifying clarity after the murders: he had told a relative that he wanted to kill his family and burn down the house.

At the time, those words had seemed too extreme to be real. People who heard them assumed he was expressing despair in a dramatic way, not outlining a plan. In hindsight, they were a blueprint.

Investigators also confirmed that Paris had tried to obtain a firearm in the weeks leading up to March 10. He had asked around about getting a gun, but had been unsuccessful. When that door closed, he turned to a weapon he already had—a knife in his kitchen.

Experts who later weighed in on the case described it as a textbook example of familicide, the killing of one’s own family. Across the world, such cases, while rare, tend to follow a recognizable pattern: a man, usually the father, feels cornered by financial ruin, legal trouble, or personal failure. Instead of facing public humiliation, divorce, or prison, he convinces himself that the only way out is to destroy everything, including those who depend on him.

It is not logic. It is control, distorted pride, despair turned lethal.

Paris Oda fit the profile too well.

There was no record of him beating his wife. No domestic violence calls on file. No long history of police intervention. To neighbors, the Odas had appeared stable, even happy at times. That absence of outward warning signs made the crime even harder to process. It suggested that his worst thoughts had lived mostly in his own head and in the few conversations where he had tested them out loud.

For the families of Naoko and the children, the grief was nearly unspeakable. They were forced to bury not one, but four loved ones at once, while also grappling with the knowledge that the man who had done this to them would never stand in a courtroom, never sit at a defense table, never be cross-examined. His death had taken away not just his own life, but any chance to demand explanation or apology.

Funerals were held. The services for Naoko and the children drew crowds—relatives, friends, classmates, teachers, neighbors, and strangers who just couldn’t stay home. People brought flowers. Photos of the family were displayed: Naoko smiling, the kids on vacations, at school events, at home. There were hymns, speeches, quiet sobs echoing off church walls.

Paris was not mourned with them. His name, when spoken at all, came out through clenched teeth and tears. Not as a victim, but as the architect of the violence that had ripped through their lives.

Mānoa Valley, which had always symbolized peace and family life to many in Honolulu, was forced to confront a new identity: a place where one of Hawaiʻi’s most intimate and devastating crimes had played out behind closed doors.

Vigils sprang up.

Outside the Oda home, candles appeared on the sidewalk and the steps. Flowers piled up along the fence. Handwritten notes from children, in shaky pencil and crayon, showed hearts and messages: “We miss you.” “Rest in peace.” “For Sakurako, Orion, and Nana.” People who had never met them came to stand in the evening light, some praying, some just staring at the house trying to understand how such horror could fit inside four walls.

Teachers at schools across Honolulu found themselves having conversations no one ever wants to have with children. Counselors were brought in. Classmates of Sakurako and Orion tried to make sense of why their desks were now empty. Parents hugged their own kids tighter, suddenly aware in a new and terrifying way of how fragile normal can be.

Journalists and commentators drew comparisons to other infamous cases in Hawaiʻi’s history, most notably the Xerox shootings of 1999, when a disgruntled employee killed seven co-workers in one of the state’s worst mass shootings. But as they pointed out, the Mānoa murders were different.

The Xerox case was workplace violence—a mass killing in an office building. The Oda case was violence in the most private, sacred space a family has: their home. There were no co-workers, no strangers, no random victims. There was only a wife and three children, killed by the man they should have been safest with.

The contrast made the crime cut even deeper.

In the weeks that followed, discussions about mental health and financial pressure surfaced in Hawaiʻi’s media and beyond. Experts emphasized how common it is for people—especially men raised to prize strength and self-reliance—to hide their fears and shame. Debt, failure, and the possibility of legal consequences can push someone already fragile to a place where their thinking twists into something dark and disconnected from reality.

But none of those explanations, however accurate they might be from a clinical standpoint, made the pain easier to bear for those left behind.

To Naoko’s family, it did not matter how desperate Paris had been about money. It didn’t matter what he feared, what he felt, or how his pride had warped his view of the future. Nothing could justify what he had done. There was no amount of stress that could explain, in any acceptable way, the decision to pick up a knife and turn it on sleeping children.

As the investigation closed—there would be no trial, no jury, no verdict—the unanswered questions began to harden into something else: regret.

People who had heard Paris’s frightening words in the weeks before the murders replayed those conversations in their minds. What if they had called police? What if they had told someone in authority, insisted that he was a danger to his family? Could something have been done? Could Naoko and the children have been saved?

Police, for their part, stood by their handling of the early 911 calls. They pointed out that there had been no history of domestic violence at the address, no prior reports that would have flagged the home as high risk. When they first visited that morning and couldn’t find clear grounds to enter, they were constrained by the law as it currently exists. Only the second call, with more disturbing detail, pushed the situation into a category where forced entry could be justified.

Still, in Mānoa and across Honolulu, “What if?” hung in the air like the valley’s morning mist.

By the summer of 2024, the Oda house had become an open wound on the street. Some neighbors couldn’t stand to look at it. There were calls to tear it down, to remove the physical reminder of what had happened there. Others argued that erasing the house wouldn’t erase the story—that it might be more important to let it stand as a quiet warning about what can happen when despair goes unspoken, unchecked, and unaddressed.

The legacy of the Mānoa murders works on two levels.

On one level, it is the story of one man’s collapse—a father and husband whose pride, fear, and untreated despair led him to commit the most unforgivable act: killing his own family and himself rather than face failure in public. It is a case study in the deadly side of financial stress and shame.

On another level, it is a story of a community’s response. It is the image of candles flickering in the humid Hawaiian night. Of strangers gathering outside a house to say the names of people they never met: Naoko. Sakurako. Orion. Nana. Of teachers, counselors, pastors, and neighbors trying to help one another carry a weight that will never fully lighten.

Naoko is remembered as a mother who poured everything into her children, a woman whose life was defined by their needs and their joy. People talk about her patience, her dedication, the way she seemed to always put others first.

Sakurako is remembered as a young woman on the verge of everything—college, work, travel, possibility. Friends recall her laughter, her kindness, her plans.

Orion is remembered as curious, energetic, full of life. Teachers talk about his questions, his humor, the way he filled a room.

Nana is remembered as pure innocence—a ten-year-old whose biggest worries should have been homework and playground games, not survival.

Their names appear on posters at vigils, in stories shared on social media, in quiet conversations at kitchen tables. They are the heart of this tragedy—the four lives that should have stretched out across decades but were cut off in a single night.

Paris’s name is remembered too, but in another way. It is spoken with anger, with disbelief, sometimes with an attempt to understand how he changed from a father and provider into a killer. For many, his name has become shorthand for what happens when a person lets pride and fear strangle compassion and reason.

Mānoa Valley will heal. Time and new stories will slowly soften the edges of this one. Children will grow up there, playing on sidewalks, walking to school, laughing under the same Hawaiian sky. New families will move in. Yards will be mowed, holidays celebrated, lives built.

But the scar will remain.

Because in March 2024, in a green valley just outside Honolulu, Hawaiʻi, in the United States, a house that looked like any other became proof of something people don’t like to admit:

That sometimes, the most dangerous person in a community isn’t the stranger lurking in the shadows or the faceless killer in a news story from somewhere else.

Sometimes, it’s the person sitting at the dinner table. The one who smiles for photos. The one who kisses their kids goodnight.

And sometimes, the danger isn’t outside at all. It’s behind a door that looks, from the street, perfectly ordinary—until the morning when the first drops of blood slide under the frame and someone finally realizes that something is very, very wrong.