PRESS RELEASE
PITTSBURGH — Cybergenetics’ TrueAllele technology was featured on a recent NBC Dateline episode covering the widely followed State of Hawaii v. Eric Thompson “bucket hat” homicide case.
In January 2022, acupuncturist Jon Tokuhara was shot and killed inside his Waipahu clinic. The police believed the tragedy stemmed from a deadly love triangle. Surveillance footage captured a man in the area wearing a Quicksilver bucket hat. As the suspect fled the scene, he dropped the hat, later recovered by a passerby. That one seemingly minor item became the crucial link to the killer.
Cybergenetics analysts used TrueAllele Casework to analyze the DNA recovered from the hat. The crime lab’s DNA mixture interpretation protocols couldn’t give an answer. But advanced TrueAllele computing assisted the prosecution, reliably connecting suspect Eric Thompson to the hat with a match statistic of 16.4 trillion. The results statistically excluded other references.
Across multiple court sessions in 2024, TrueAllele’s reliability was challenged in a pre-trial admissibility hearing. On December 3, 2024, the judge ruled that the TrueAllele evidence was admissible.
On February 5, 2025, a Cybergenetics analyst testified in the re-trial before a Honolulu jury about the TrueAllele DNA results. On February 25, 2025 the jury convicted Thompson of second-degree murder and a firearm charge.
Watch NBC Dateline’s “The Bucket Hat Mystery” for a detailed account of the entire case.
Read more about “Honolulu Homicide - Love, lies, and little DNA” in the Cybergenetics’ Newsroom
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About TrueAllele
To date, TrueAllele technology has assisted over 750 governmental, nonprofit, and private organizations. These include police departments, prosecutors, defense attorneys, and innocence groups. From these forensic DNA interpretation efforts, Cybergenetics has supplied TrueAllele match results in over 1,400 cases across 48 U.S. states. 200 state, local, federal, foreign, and private DNA laboratories have sent their electronic DNA data to Cybergenetics for TrueAllele analysis. This broad usage underscores the technology’s ability to develop useful information from DNA data that other mixture methods find “uninterpretable”.