REGIONAL NEWS ROUNDUP: Former Colfax man aids elderly couple during the Maui fire

Stories in this Regional News Roundup are excerpted from weekly newspapers from around the region. This is part one, with part two scheduled to appear in Sunday’s Tribune.

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COLFAX — David Nails, a former Colfax resident and a Native member of the Nazarene Church in Pukalani in Maui, Hawaii, rescued an elderly couple in their 80s from the burn zone during the Maui fires.

Nails said he grew up in Colfax and graduated from the local high school before moving to Maui two years ago. He had initially gone to Maui for an internship in 2020 and stayed for four months.

When he phoned Mark Gudmunson, the senior pastor of the Nazarene Church in Pukalani, he offered Nails a job,

“The rest is history,” Nails said.

Gudmunson said the church operates an official Red Cross-sanctioned fire relief center.

“I served originally as the director of youth ministries, but since the fire started, I’m the lead operations coordinator of our fires center,” Nails said.

Responding to an urgent request from his former football coach, Todd Kinley, pastor at Onecho Bible Church, Nails rescued the elderly couple from the burn zone, after they’d been sheltered for a couple of days with no power, limited water and food.

“It was actually pretty miraculous,” Nails said. “Somehow, through God, he (Kinley) got a message on Facebook from a friend of a friend whose parents were stuck.”

Nails said the zone was completely blocked off, but he was able to contact another church bringing in emergency aid. The couple was stuck with no power because of the raging fire, Nails said.

“All they had for food was a box of cereal, bread, and milk,” he said. “They just thought it was a big power outage or a hurricane was going.”

According to Nails, rescuers worked with the other church and the Maui Police Department, and were able to get a police escort to the specific drop zones.

That area of the islands is usually busy with a lot of lights at night, Nails said, noting that at the time it was completely dark, with the only glow being the fire.

Not being able to use phones, Nails and his team printed off maps to navigate the islands.

“There’s so many hotels that look exactly the same,” he said, “God was guiding us.”

The crew was directed to the couple’s door with a flashlight, and though the couple was leery of them, Nails explained that he was in contact with their son-in-law.

“It was the biggest surprise to the elderly couple because they didn’t know what was going on,” Nails said, adding it was their 60th anniversary.

The group got out with all of the couple’s belongings and relocated them to the church.

“They had a super good outlook,” Nails said, noting they’d said while they may have just lost a vacation, many others had lost their homes.

Nails said that while the couple stayed with the church they got close, and it felt like family.

“Ohana,” he said, using the Hawaiian term for family. “It’s cool how God puts people together.”

— Teresa Simpson, Whitman County Gazette (Colfax), Thursday