The Kid had mustered an enthusiastic defense. He told Ritte that he believed what the elders said: that monk seals didn’t belong here and were upsetting the natural balance Hawaiians depended on. Ritte listened, then told him about his first experience with monk seals — back in 2006, while Ritte was campaigning to stop a developer from building luxury housing on a remote Molokai coastline called Laau Point. Laau Point is a prime fishing and hunting ground, and Ritte and his troops believed that losing access to it would degrade Hawaiians’ ability to provide for themselves, driving them and their traditions even closer to extinction. Hundreds of protesters occupied the point for three months, sleeping on the beach. And there, in the quiet, monk seals began to appear on the sand — the first that some protesters had ever seen. Ritte told me that, sleeping side by side — Hawaiians and Hawaiian monk seals — it was just so clear to him: “I was there for survival, and the seals were there for the same reason. I saw myself in the seals.”

“Uncle Walt is a well-respected man,” the Kid now said. Ritte’s appearance on his doorstep that day was itself a rebuke. So the Kid kept listening as Ritte explained that monk seals had actually lived in Hawaii long before Hawaiians did, and that Hawaiians — a people who know displacement and disregard — should feel kinship with the animals, rather than resentment. The seal was here first, and we have no right to push it out, Ritte told him. This hit the Kid hard; he still sounded crushed under the weight of this truth: “I actually killed another Hawaiian,” he told me.

Outside the Kid’s house that day, Ritte hadn’t actually asked him for any details. He didn’t need to hear: the two sides of the monk-seal debate had become so predictable that it was easy for him to fill in the rest. When we first met, Ritte told me that the Kid was presumably “doing what the elders had said. It was like killing a mongoose that ate his mother’s chickens. I mean, he thought nothing of it.” And now, I caught myself making the same assumptions. Until I asked.

The Kid seemed relieved to walk me through the story. He and his friends had hiked out to fish but kept finding monk seals at all their favorite spots. Finally, at one location, they encountered the 8-year-old bull, a huge animal with a deformed jaw, sprawled out as though it were waiting for them. One of the Kid’s friends was fuming by now — they’d walked so far — and he goaded the Kid to do something. “I guess it was out of anger, frustration,” the Kid told me, “and kind of like peer pressure.” In retrospect, so much about what happened next surprised him: how impulsively he reached for a rock and threw it; how, though he only intended to scare the animal off and was standing a fair distance away, the rock somehow struck the seal squarely in the head, and some force inside the monk seal instantaneously shut off.

His friends clammed up. The Kid was the smallest, gentlest guy in the group, and “that was the first time I ever did something like that,” he said. At first, they assumed he only knocked the animal out. But eventually it sank in, and they steeled themselves and turned to walk home. “Already,” the Kid told me, “it was eating me up.”

Later, a federal investigator told me that key details of the Kid’s story were consistent with the necropsy report. (“The animal was hit on the head,” he said. “It was a blunt trauma to the head.”) A government scientist familiar with the case was more circumspect; he explained that it would be possible to kill a resting monk seal by throwing a very heavy rock — maybe on impact, or more likely by causing internal bleeding — but extremely difficult. Frankly, I don’t know what happened. The Kid seemed so vulnerable that I believed his story on the spot. I’ve had moments of skepticism since then — moments when I’ve wondered if, say, the Kid hadn’t actually stood over the animal and dropped a 20-pound boulder on its head, and was now trying to distance himself from that act. But either way, he acted impulsively and now regretted what he had done.

It was only a few weeks after the incident that the second murdered monk seal was found on Molokai. “Then after the second one,” the Kid said, “they had the one on Kauai, and I was thinking like, Oh, no, what did I start? Even Uncle Walter told me that it might have set off some kind of chain reaction.” The Kid had never really been a churchgoer, he said, but recently his wife decided they ought to start. And a couple of weeks ago, he prayed about the monk seal for the first time. “I kind of just prayed and asked for forgiveness,” he explained. He wanted to come clean but worried his family would suffer if he did. “I know what I had done was wrong, and I just basically asked Him for guidance,” he said — a safe way to confess. “And lo and behold,” the Kid told me, “here you are.”