As Civil Beat was reporting last year on a foster dad who sexually preyed on and beat the boys in his care, the state intervened to prevent the release of court documents that detailed how it could have happened.
The Department of Human Services, the only remaining defendant in the lawsuit brought by one of the victims, argued that the trial exhibits should be sealed to protect the strict confidentiality of the foster care system.
Public First Law Center objected, arguing that the public has a strong interest in understanding the failures of the child welfare system. A few days later, Judge Kevin Morikone gave the state 45 days to file redacted versions of the trial exhibits
John Teixeira cared for boys sent by the state at homes in Waimānalo, Waiʻanae and the Big Island. A judge found he sexually abused one of those boys 100 times. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2025)
Now those documents are public. And they offer a rare glimpse into the workings of the child welfare system, and how a predator could go unchecked for more than two decades.
“It again confirms that civil suits are one of the only ways of piercing the CWS veil of secrecy,” said Ben Creps, staff attorney at Public First, which advocates for government transparency. “It is one of the few ways to peer into the Family Court … It does seem to take some sort of tragedy to bring things to light.”
A Civil Beat series last year detailed how child protection workers kept placing boys with John Teixeira – about 60 in all – despite clear signs that the pastoral settings of his homes were far from the idyll they portrayed.
The new records provide a wealth of new information about dubious claims by Teixeira and fishy situations overlooked or discounted by state regulators.
Starting from the time he was approved to be a foster dad, the trial exhibits detail how the state stood behind Teixeira for decades despite ample evidence that it should have been investigating him instead.
Teixeira took in his last foster boy in 2006 but it was not until 2024 that the truth came out after one of the now-grown boys sued him and the state. Morikone handled that case and found that Teixeira had sexually molested the plaintiff 100 times, performed oral sex on another and physically abused many of the boys. Older boys sexually preyed on younger ones under his watch in a setting the judge compared to the dystopian book “Lord of the Flies.”
Morikone awarded the plaintiff known as John Roe 121 – referred to in Civil Beat’s stories as “JR” – almost half a million dollars.
Shifting Explanations About A Theft
The newly released documents start with Teixeira’s application to become a foster father. He took in his first foster boy in the early 1980s, although it’s unclear from the record who approved him to do so.
A decade later, after that boy had become an adult, Teixeira applied to become a foster parent for the state Judiciary. So, the court system did a criminal background check.
A serious run-in with the law could have been the first opportunity to prevent what instead became two more decades of him fostering boys. Instead, the documents now public expose how Teixeira talked his way out of the situation.
The court screeners discovered that Teixeira had pleaded guilty in 1983 to stealing a $289.99 welding suit from the Sears in Kāneʻohe – nearly $1,000 in today’s dollars.
Teixeira had an explanation for the felony that led to five years’ probation and 100 hours of community service, according to a newly released trial exhibit: He said he had run into a neighbor at the Sears. The young man offered to drive Teixeira home. But first, the friend asked him to take some packages to his car while the friend looked at something else.
Teixeira explained to the court’s foster parent screener that he didn’t tell the police what had really happened because he knew the young neighbor was constantly in trouble. Instead, he said, he took the fall.
“He has reminded himself of the decision to cover for someone who didn’t deserve his loyalty or trust,” the screener wrote.
In Teixeira’s telling, the felony became an edifying lesson, not to mention an example of his selflessness. He was approved.
Seven years later, the Department of Human Services was reviewing Teixeira’s application to serve as a foster parent in its own, separate child welfare system, according to one of the trial exhibits. It, too, discovered the theft conviction.
This time, Teixeira came up with a new explanation: His friend had attached a fake price tag to the welding suit. Teixeira said he didn’t know about it, but was convicted as an accessory anyway.
A microfilmed court record available in Circuit Court in Honolulu shows that John Teixeira pleaded guilty to stealing a welding suit from Sears and that no other party was named. (Circuit Court case file/1982)
DHS approved him despite the conviction.
But the arrest record and indictment in the 1983 case, publicly available from the beginning at the Circuit Court records room in downtown Honolulu, make no mention of a false price tag or Teixeira being an accessory.
In his guilty plea, he wrote simply, “I shoplifted a welding outfit.”
An Ever-Expanding Foster Household
In his various applications to foster boys, Teixeira repeatedly avowed that he did not use corporal punishment and never had. Yet a 1991 home study to assess his suitability — one of the court exhibits just made public — recounts an episode that suggested otherwise.
The young man he was fostering, in his hurry to finish his chores, “foolishly” threw rubbish into a neighbor’s yard, according to the home study.
Teixeira “grabbed the youth and pinned him against the wall,” it states, “the youth became frightened” and cried, causing Teixeira to release him. Although Teixeira’s name is still redacted in this, as in some other documents, the context makes clear that it is him.
“He said that he apologized to the youth and no other incidence of physical force happened in their relationship which still remains stable,” the study continues.
That incident was another missed opportunity to put a stop to abuse that would instead persist. Several of the boys later fostered by Teixeira would say they were beaten, and at least one adult witnessed it. Judge Morikone in 2024 found that he had physically abused the boys.
Teixeira was arrested in 2008 after one of the boys in his custody accused him of hitting him in the mouth and beating him with various objects over the years. The case was later dropped.. (Civil Beat graphic/2025; Source Image: Newspapers.com/Hawaiʻi Tribune-Herald/2008)
Another recurring theme in the new documents is the extraordinarily large number of boys the state allowed Teixeira to care for, especially since it is unusual for a single man with no children to foster children at all.
A 1992 update of his file for the court fostering system found that his house could accommodate as many as four children, but “placement of more than two children would depend on the amount of care and supervision needed.”
Yet several years later, Teixeira was licensed to take in as many as seven boys, in addition to several others who had transitioned from the foster system to having Teixeira as their legal guardian. Teixeira lived with the boys at two locations in Waimānalo before moving with them to Waiʻanae and then the Big Island.
Most of the boys came with profound levels of emotional trauma and histories of troubling behavior, including one who had been caught having sex with a dog and had set fire to a car, another who’d abused dogs and horses, and a third with a track record of stealing liquor and acting violently toward other children.
“He had far too many children in his care with significant unmet needs which posed a danger to themselves and others,” Judge Morikone would later write.
Years earlier, outside observers had come to the same conclusion and asked the state to explain, according to the court exhibits.
In 1999, a surrogate parent in the school attended by one of the foster boys — the plaintiff in the later lawsuit identified as John Roe 121 — “wondered how John could have 8 foster children.”
JR’s social worker informed the school that he was technically not a foster dad to all the boys; he had permanent custody of legal guardianship of several of them.
“DHS does not have concerns about John; he is an excellent foster parent, there is something about him that the kids do very well with him,” the social worker wrote in JR’s case log.
In 2000, the birth father of one of the boys in Teixeira’s care called to complain that the foster father was caring for “10 children” and had enough money to buy a new car, insinuating this was made possible by the foster care payments.
The new trial exhibits do not indicate how the state responded to this complaint. But the state’s acceptance of the unusual situation — a single man with eight or more troubled boys — seems to have had as much to do with necessity as confidence in Teixeira.
When it came to a placement for JR, a social worker wrote in 1998: “Looks like John is the only option.”
Teixeira was paid a monthly stipend for each boy, and these payments continued even after he became their legal guardian. The new records include his applications for money on top of the standard rate of $529 a month to compensate him for the difficulty of caring for them.
In one 1997 worksheet justifying an extra $570 a month for one boy, he states that he spends an hour and a half each day constantly reminding that boy “about dirty laundry in his room, brushing his teeth and taking a bath.”
John Teixeira repeatedly applied for extra payments for his charges, listing the time he spent dealing with their extraordinary needs. (Redacted trial exhibit)
Teixeira would say in a deposition in JR’s lawsuit that all the boys came with extra stipends “because of how bad they were to begin with and no one else would take them.”
The boys also helped out with Teixeira’s various businesses and he got a break on rent for doing work around the property — one newly released document shows that his $1,000 rent was cut to $200 to $300 because he and the boys took care of the horses at the Waimānalo home.
‘Sometimes I Get Confused’
Then there was the curious incident of the BB gun.
In late 1998, a 14-year-old foster boy in Teixeira’s home shot his 7-year-old brother in the abdomen with a BB gun while the younger boy was jumping on a trampoline. Doctors thought the pellet might have damaged his liver and he spent two days in the hospital.
In his later lawsuit, JR testified that the older boy shot the younger one on purpose with a BB gun that Teixeira had given them for Christmas. Afterward, he said Teixeira told the boys to lie and say that they had found the gun in a ditch.
Before the release of the new records, it was unclear whether the state ever investigated this incident. Now the trial exhibits show it did, and that it believed Teixeira over the account given by the 7-year-old victim.
They reveal that Teixeira told the state’s investigator that the older boy had found the gun on the ground. Teixeira said he thought the gun didn’t work until the boy pulled the trigger and it went off.
Some of the boys, including JR, told the same or similar stories. But the 7-year-old said the gun had been under the Christmas tree, a present from Teixeira to the older boys, the new trial exhibits show.
In a second interview, he changed his story to conform with what Teixeira and the other boys had said. Then, his questioner reminded him what he’d said about the Christmas present. “Oh, yeah, I forgot,” the boy said. “Sometimes I get confused.”
The gun had been a gift after all, he said, and the older boy had taken it outside to practice on targets without Teixeira’s permission.
If that were so, the questioner asked, why didn’t Teixeira, who was feeding chickens nearby, hear the shots and stop him? The boy said he didn’t know.
“Wondering what story is,” a social worker wrote in the case log.
A couple of weeks later, the social worker noted that he had asked the investigator about the case.
“At this point, looks like Mr. Teixeira was telling the truth; that the kids found the gun. If it appears that he’s lying will assign for investigation,” the social worker wrote, apparently referring to a more formal inquiry than the one already done.
Nonetheless, ultimately the state said it found no evidence that Teixeira had been negligent.
State social workers rarely visited Teixeira’s foster homes in Waimānalo and Waiʻanae, several of the former foster boys later said. (Kevin Fujii/Civil Beat/2025)
Coming To The Foster Dad’s Defense
Again and again, the record shows that child welfare workers vouched for Teixeira. When some staff members at JR’s school said that Teixeira had been hostile and uncooperative, JR’s guardian ad litem – appointed by the court to advocate for him – intervened and smoothed things over.
The guardian “told participants that (Teixeira) has worked for number of years and that he has done well with hard core children,” according to a log entry. The school officials “didn’t know this. Participants said he is belligerent.”
The school questioned whether JR, who was causing problems at school, was seeing his psychologist as regularly as Teixeira claimed.
A social worker’s notation in the log later noted that “there haven’t been a whole lot” of sessions with the psychologist. In fact, JR had just gone two months without seeing him at all, according to the log.
Meanwhile, the newly released documents show how caseworkers touted Teixeira to JR’s biological parents, whose parental rights had been terminated.
When his biological father asked a state worker where JR was, a social worker responded that the department could not reveal his location, but could tell him that the boy was in “an excellent home; his family is committed to him.” The caseworker said JR had gone through some tough times, but his caregiver knew how to deal with his problems and he was happy there.
When his mother flew from her new home in Las Vegas to Hawaiʻi for a funeral and asked about seeing him, a social worker told her to talk to Teixeira.
The social worker warned her “not to get her hopes up” about seeing him but assured her JR “is in a very good home. He is in a permanent home.”
The state continued its pattern of defending Teixeira in the most serious accusation of all.
In 2003, a foster boy named Hoku Freitas who had run away from Teixeira’s home two and a half years earlier, told police that Teixeira “molested children.” Hoku mentioned one boy in particular, 14 at the time. Teixeira, he said, fondled this boy’s penis and licked his breasts.
Hoku added that the foster dad “played around” with the boys in his permanent custody because they no longer had anyone visiting or checking up on them. He also had shared a bed with one of his charges, and got mad when this boy showed an interest in girls, Hoku said.
The initial intake by the Department of Human Services, one of the trial exhibits now public, said all the boys in the household should be treated as potential victims. If the allegations were true, the document states, Teixeira’s actions were indicative of “a perpetrator who uses control and manipulation of others for his own sexual gain/gratification.”
It was correct, the intake report said, that Teixeira getting permanent custody of boys would essentially end any outside scrutiny. And there was no other adult in the household to monitor what was going on.
It also cited “extremely poor boundaries/structure” in the household. The source of this information is unclear but stands out, given that the rest of the record contains nothing but praise for Teixeira.
An investigator talked to the boys, including the alleged victim. As in the BB gun incident, they all told the same story — no one knew anything about any sexual transgressions.
Teixeira not only denied the accusations. “His response was of shock, disbelief and even tearful,” the investigator wrote. “He reports only wanting the best for his foster children.”
She instead found that it was Hoku who lacked credibility. Case closed.
Two decades later, when JR’s lawsuit accused Teixeira of rampant sexual abuse, he would enlist the alleged victim in the 2003 incident to testify in a deposition that he, too, had been sexually assaulted by Teixeira.
One More Boy?
Before now, it was unclear from the record why Teixeira stopped fostering boys. The new trial exhibits don’t solve that, although they do rule out one thing. They show that it wasn’t the result of any misgivings on the part of state social workers, who continued to talk about placing boys there until the end.
In 2007, Teixeira told DHS that he was willing to take one more child — a boy between the ages of 10 and 13.
Unbeknownst to the state, he moved later that year to the Big Island, where his new home had not been licensed to accept foster children.
After Teixeira moved to the Big Island, Rahiem Morris ran away from home, saying his legal guardian had bloodied his lip and in the past had beaten him with sticks, extension cords and hangers. (Civil Beat illustration, photo courtesy of Sharon Fernandez-Thomas/2025)
There, another boy already in Teixeira’s custody, Rahiem Morris, ran away from home and eventually told police in early 2008 that he fled because Teixeira hit him in the face, bloodying his lip. Over the years, he said, his foster father and eventual legal guardian had beaten him with sticks, extension cords and hangers.
The new exhibits show that DHS opened an investigation but they do not reveal what came of it. Other boys were removed from the home but only temporarily. Teixeira was charged, but for reasons unspecified in the court record, the case was dropped.
None of it was enough to budge state social workers from their two-decade insistence that Teixeira was a worthy foster father.
At the end of 2008, the new documents show, a state social worker who had supervised foster children in Teixeira’s care contacted one of his colleagues to ask if Teixeira had an opening for another child he wanted to place with him.
The colleague responded that Teixeira would have to be relicensed because of his move to the Big Island. According to the log, she later talked to Teixeira about how to transfer his license.
The records do not show that he ever pursued it.
On JR’s 18th birthday in 2008, one of the exhibits shows, the state sent Teixeira notice that he would no longer be getting the $1,099 monthly payment for being JR’s legal guardian. But the year before, when Teixeira moved to the Big Island, JR had remained behind with an aunty in Waiʻanae.
The record does not explain why the state did not notify Teixeira it was ending the payments until months after JR was no longer in his care.
This project is supported by the Fund for Investigative Journalism.
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