What happened to Kollin Elderts?

“Forget everything you think you know about Hawaii. This place is much weirder and much more complicated than you ever imagined.” This is the caveat Jessica Terrell impresses upon listeners as the curtain rises on Offshore, a new PRX series that promises nothing more and nothing less than “stories from Hawaii.” And telling those stories, it turns out, requires a lot of context that residents of the continental U.S. might not be equipped with: most importantly, that the islands are fraught with division among tourists, military personnel, and native Hawaiians, and that colonialism continues to both haunt and inform the latter group’s daily life. It’s no surprise, then, that the 2011 shooting of a native Hawaiian by an off-duty Virginian cop in Waikiki would spark such backlash and animus on all sides, a powder keg lit by 2:40 a.m. gunfire. The Christopher Deedy and Kollin Elderts incident will be further investigated in the coming weeks of Offshore, but more importantly, the show is determined to turn one homicide case into a greater case study, prodding at its details and aftermath to see just what it can tell us about the current state of our nation as a whole.