Posted on: Tuesday, August 14, 2001

Family's tragedy stuns hunting community

By Walter Wright
Advertiser Staff Writer

A bizarre hunting accident in which a veteran Big Island bowman was killed by his son's arrow Sunday has devastated that family and stunned Hawai'i's archery community.

Thomas Depontes, 44, of Kailua-Kona, died after an arrow fired at a sheep by his eldest son apparently ricocheted off a rock and hit Depontes in the heart.

The son, Thomas, 18, was "not doing too well," Jamie Depontes, a relative, said yesterday.

Archers across the state were puzzled over how Depontes, a longtime hunter, could have been in a position to be hit by the arrow, and how a son he trained could have released it.

The tragic news cast a pall over Depontes' 110 state co-workers at the Keahole Airport, where he was a laborer in the maintenance department.

Co-workers have gathered around the Depontes family before, raising thousands of dollars when their daughter was stricken with leukemia, which is in remission.

They undoubtedly will rally again; officials learned yesterday that Depontes' wife, Gina Marie, was recently laid off. But friends said their sadness could not compare with the agony of Depontes' son.

"That has got to be devastating," airport operations manager George Ackerman said.

Joe Maria, Depontes' supervisor at the airport, visited the family yesterday and said the son is racked with feelings of guilt even though, as Maria put it, "God only knows" why the arrow glanced off a rock on a deadly path.

Police gave no details on the relative location of the two men when the injury occurred Sunday on Pu'uwa'awa'a Ranch, but said they have tentatively classified the death as an accident.

His two sons, who had dragged their father to his truck after the accident, returned to the scene yesterday with police to reconstruct the events.

Funeral arrangements have been delayed while police await the arrival of a pathologist from Maui tomorrow to conduct an autopsy.

But Maria said family reported that the arrow-head remained lodged in Depontes' heart even after he wrenched the shaft free, and that he died from loss of blood. Depontes was pronounced dead after arriving at North Hawai'i Community Hospital in Waimea.

Hawai'i's hunting community was waiting for details of the strange accident in hopes of preventing a recurrence.

"My phone has been ringing off the hook with calls from my hunting safety instructors asking what happened and what we can do to avoid this in the future," said Wendell Kam of the Department of Land and Natural Resources.

Kam, specialist in charge of conservation education, organizes the hunter-education courses required of the10,000 to 11,000 people who buy the state's all-purpose hunting license for firearms and bow and arrow. He was hunting in another part of the same ranch Sunday, and heard the news as he was returning to Honolulu.

Kam said the only other archery fatality he knew of occurred when a Mainland hunter accidentally shot an arrow directly at another hunter he didn't see because he was camouflaged and in cover.

The state's class tells hunters to know their "zones of fire" and to not shoot if anyone is near that zone, Kam said. "And we do impress on them the potential for ricochets," he said. "The basic rule is if something can happen, it will happen."

"And if it cannot happen, it will happen anyway," added Al Marciel, proprietor of Jimmy's Archery in Hilo. Marciel knew Depontes as an "old-timer" in the hunting fraternity.

"And we cannot imagine an old-time hunter being in a position where that might occur," Marciel said.

Arrows can ricochet off something as flimsy as a twig, said Jay Chrisman of Honolulu, past president of the Aloha Archery Association.

Chrisman, who has hunted with bow and arrow locally and around the world for 35 years, said "this is just one of those things that is a freak accident, and it will probably go another 30, 40 or 50 years before you hear of one like it again."

He described hunting with bow and arrow as a connection with nature that people in Hawai'i have known for a long time.

Depontes and his sons "were doing what they love. He was probably a very, very good father, who liked to be with his kids, doing something healthy and beautiful," Chrisman said.