Family says goodbye to Beth Chapman
HONOLULU (AP) — About 500 people watched from the shore and the waters off a beach as family and friends held a memorial service to say goodbye to reality-TV star Beth Chapman, who rose to fame as the wife of “Dog the Bounty Hunter.”
The service was held Saturday at Fort DeRussy Beach Park in Waikiki.
Chapman, 51, died Wednesday at Queen’s Medical Center in Honolulu after an almost 2-year battle with cancer.
After a short prayer circle on a grassy stretch at Fort DeRussy Beach Park, a flotilla of outrigger canoes, stand-up paddle boarders, surfers and several large boats, including a catamaran, headed out in tribute. They were later joined by her husband Duane “Dog” Chapman and other family members.
Inmate software update program delayed as cost rises
HONOLULU (AP) — Hawaii’s Department of Public Safety doesn’t have an updated software system for tracking and managing information on inmates after spending nearly $1.4 million over four years on the project, the Honolulu Star-Advertiser reported Sunday.
A Honolulu company called Pas de Chocolat was awarded the contract through the Research Corporation of the University of Hawaii.
That contract became an issue earlier this year during Senate confirmation hearings for the two top officials at the Department of Public Safety. Department officials said there was nothing improper about the contract.
But the ex-director of a joint program between the department and the university under which the contract fell says he believes he and 15 other full- and part-time employees lost their jobs earlier this year, in part, because he began asking questions about it.
The newspaper said it found in a review of hundreds of pages of contract-related documents obtained through public records requests that although work on two of three phases of the contract was initially supposed to be completed by mid-2015, the contract for those phases was amended nine times and extended through 2019 as its costs continued to escalate.