It didn’t take long for the police to identify suspects, and within two years, two young men had been convicted of beating Ty to death after riding in his cab from Waikiki to Waipahu and getting into a fight after trying to skip the fare.īut more than a decade later, one of those men - Michael Robles - has recanted his testimony against the other, Kilani Derego, who as the alleged instigator had been sentenced to life in prison with the possibility of parole.Īnd after a series of legal twists and turns, Derego is scheduled to be retried in a Honolulu courtroom starting this month. He had escaped one of the most notoriously savage episodes in recent history only to meet a violent death in the seeming peace of paradise. Then, late one night in 2010, on his 41st birthday, Ty was found beaten to death next to his cab in the parking lot of a Times’ Supermarket in Waipahu. But he wanted to spend more time with his two young children, and so he started driving a cab. Ty found a job where his father had been working, Kapiolani Coffee Shop, famous for its oxtail soup, and stayed there for several years. Charlys Ty Tang, left, with his good friend Hongly Khuy, who lived next door to his family on Kapiolani Boulevard and met Ty when he arrived from a Vietnamese refugee camp. And by comparison, it was a land of plenty, where used furniture someone left on the curb could be dusted off and made perfectly serviceable. It was anything but luxurious, but it was a safe haven a world away from the chaos they had escaped. Now 18 or 19, Ty reunited with his family, squeezing into a studio apartment on Kapiolani Boulevard with his parents and siblings. At last, the coconut wireless of the Cambodian diaspora produced an answer: All this time, Ty had been in a refugee camp in Vietnam. From there, they got permission to settle in Honolulu.įor almost a decade, from more than halfway across the Pacific, they sought word of their son. His parents made their way across the border to a refugee camp in Thailand. But in the chaos, Ty was separated from his family. Ty’s family, like millions of others, was forcibly evacuated to the countryside, from the capital of Phnom Penh to a northwestern province.įour years later, Vietnam invaded Cambodia and quickly routed the Khmer Rouge, ending a nightmare of famine, repressive social engineering and mass killings. Charlys Ty Tang was only 5 when the Khmer Rouge took control in Cambodia.
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