Big Island custodial interference case triggers first Arizona Turquoise Alert ever

An ongoing search for a mother wanted in a Hawai‘i Island police custodial interference case involving her 6-year-old daughter and their disappearance shifted this week to the mainland, leading to a warrant for the mother’s arrest and triggering a new Arizona missing persons alert.

Following a July 19 plea to the public seeking help with finding 48-year-old Sarah Coultas of Pa‘auilo and her daughter Violet Coultas, Hawai‘i Island police learned they are thought to be in Arizona and received credible information they were in the Phoenix area.

That prompted Arizona Department of Public Safety on July 23 to issue the state’s first Turquoise Alert ever to find Violet.

An arrest warrant for violating a court order was also subsequently issued for Coultas.

The 48-year-old Pa‘auilo white woman is 5-foot-11, 160 pounds, with straight brown hair and hazel eyes.

Violet — who police used Coultas-Benson for her last name in their July 19 release — is also white, 3-foot-10, 43 pounds, with blond hair and hazel eyes. She was last seen wearing a white shirt, pink jacket, pink sweater, light-colored shorts and white shoes.

Arizona Department of Public Safety worked in coordination with Hawai‘i Police Department and Hawai‘i Department of the Attorney General Missing Child Center to determine Violet met the criteria for the Turquoise Alert.

The alert is part of a new Arizona statewide notification system meant to help locate missing and endangered people younger than 65 years old, with an emphasis on Native American and indigenous people.

A Turquoise Alert is issued based onthe following criteria:

• The missing person is younger than 65 years old.
• The investigating law enforcement agency exhausted all available local resources.
• The person’s disappearance happened under unexplained or suspicious circumstances.
• The missing person is thought to be in danger, in the company of a potentially dangerous person or otherwise in peril.
• There is sufficient descriptive information available that, if shared, might help locate the person.

Hawai‘i Police Department thanks the Arizona Department of Public Safety for its assistance and collaboration with this ongoing investigation.

Prior to the information about them being in the Phoenix area, Coultas and Violet were last seen together at 4 p.m. July 6 at the top of Miloli‘i Road in South Kona.

Anyone with information about their whereabouts is urged to call Hawai‘i Police Department’s non-emergency line at 808-935-3311 or contact Detective Carrie Akina at 808-326-4646, ext. 278, or via email at carrie.akina@hawaiicounty.gov.

Those who want to remain anonymous can call Crime Stoppers at 808-961-8300. All Crime Stoppers information is kept strictly confidential.

Arizona’s Turquoise Alert was established in May following the approval by Arizona state lawmakers and signature by the state’s governor of Emily’s Law, named in honor of 14-year-old Emily Pike.

Pike was a member of the San Carlos Apache Tribe found dead — her body dismembered and stuffed into trash bags — on Valentine’s Day in the woods north of Globe, Ariz., after being reported missing in late January from a Mesa, Ariz., group home more than 100 miles away.

Her cause of death was released in June, ruled as “homicidal violence with blunt force trauma” by the Pinal County, Ariz., Medical Examiner’s Office.

No arrests have been made in her brutal murder.

Pike’s killing obviously spurred action by Arizona lawmakers, aimed at trying to at least begin to reverse decades of disproportionate numbers of disappearances and violent deaths of Native Americans in the state.

It also brought attention to more than 188,000 people who disappeared in 2023 throughout the United States, falling outside Amber Alert criteria. That led the Federal Communications Commission to establish a new national alert code for missing and endangered people.

Commissioners said the new code will be particularly beneficial to Native American, Alaska Native and Black communities, who make up a total of 40% of missing people in the nation.