Democratic candidate Kirill Basin is facing felony threat charges stemming from a beach brawl in Hawaii, where he allegedly brandished a knife and threatened to put sunbathers “in the ground.”
Officials said tempers flared on Aug. 1, when a 61-year-old man asked Basin to turn down his music on Keawakapu Beach in Maui. According to court documents, Basin implied he had a gun and would shoot the man’s wife.
A viral video shows bystander Kama Homan knocking Basin out cold after enduring the 40-year-old’s taunts and insults. In the video, Homan, who has mixed martial arts training, sent Basin crumpling to the grass with a single punch after Basin swung a beach chair at him. When Basin opened his eyes after a few seconds, Homan called him a “Haole,” a pejorative Hawaiian term referring to white people.
“Wake up! Wake up,” Homan says. “Watch your f—ing mouth, Haole.”
🇺🇸 Where's my Pina Colada!? A Hawaii Democratic congressional candidate Kirill Basin (40) was knocked out cold at Keawakapu Beach in Maui after he threatened a man with a knife during an argument over loud music. pic.twitter.com/o3p8LH9oEd
— Pisklauren (@pisklauren) August 5, 2026
The video showed the lead-up to the punch, during which Basin leveled several threats at Homan and others nearby. Footage from another angle showed that he laid hands on Homan first.
When a woman off-camera called him a child, he exploded: “I’m a child? I’m forty f*cking years old. I can put him in the f*cking ground … b–ch.”
Homan told Hawaii News Now the long-shot candidate had targeted “the aunties” and whoever happened to be nearby: “I’m like, maybe I should intervene, and then as I got closer and closer, he was just getting more irate and violent and then saying stuff. ‘I’m going to hurt you’ or ‘I can injure you’ or ‘You like to scrap’ to the aunties.”
But it wasn’t until Basin allegedly pulled a knife on him that Homan decided to intervene, telling the outlet it was “a game changer when I knew he was off.”
His attorney, Brandon Segal, denied that Basin had any weapons: “There’s no evidence in any of these videos that have been circulated tremendously that he ever had a knife in his possession. He never had a firearm in his possession,” he told reporters.
Prosecutors charged Basin with two counts of first-degree terroristic threatening. He is being held in jail on $1 million bail, an amount his attorney called “outrageous.” The court also recommended he undergo a mental health assessment.
This is not his first brush with the law. According to the outlet, he has a history of arrests for assault and property damage.
With the election on August 8, it’s likely Basin will remain on the ballot despite his pretrial detention. He is running in Hawaii’s second Congressional District, challenging incumbent Jill Tokuda.
