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[dogs barking]
[reporter] Have you heard about Kai, the hitchhiking hatchet hero?
If you haven't, you will.
It's the hottest video on the Internet right now.
- What do you wanna talk about? - What happened?
[reporter] This was not a typical news story.
It may have started out as one,
but it very quickly progressed into a heck of a lot more.
I mean, there's no doubt that day Kai was a hero.
Everyone around the world wanted a piece of this kid.
He could have had anything he wanted.
I mean, he could have had the money, the fame.
But this dude that I introduced the world to
went, in the matter of three months,
from this amazing, heroic, beautiful person
to wanted by authorities for murder.
- So it's a really fucked-up story. - [phone vibrating]
He's calling right now.
- [woman] Who is? - Kai.
- Hello? - [robotic voice] You have a prepaid call.
You will not be charged for this call.
This call is from an inmate at the New Jersey State Prison.
This call will be monitored and recorded.
[train clacking on tracks]
[train horn blares]
[reporter 2] When we began to hear about this next story in the newsroom
a little after 2:00 p.m. this afternoon,
it sounded very strange.
And, as KMPH news anchor Jessob Reisbeck shows us,
it only got crazier.
[Jessob] It's February 1st 2013.
I had been tabbed to report news that day.
And over the scanner came,
"There's been a car accident. It looks pretty bad."
"There's someone pinned between the car and a utility vehicle."
"The driver's yelling crazy things."
"'I'm Jesus Christ." "All Black people deserve to die.'"
Racist things. Terrible things.
An absolute bizarre scene here in West Fresno
at the corner of McKinley and Marks.
I was a sports anchor and reporter,
and, for whatever reason, we were short on news reporters.
So this was literally my first day covering news,
and it turned out to be,
man, something else.
A man plows his car into a PG&E worker,
pinning him against his truck, because the worker was Black.
And innocent bystanders come to the rescue.
He must have done this on purpose. Like, he tried to kill this dude.
My mom ran to the driver to make sure he was okay
'cause we thought maybe it was just an accident.
He just kept saying he was Jesus Christ
and he's gonna save all of us and that, but we have to get…
He used the N word, meaning the Black people and that.
He said we need to get them off of the earth.
[Jessob] The driver ends up being this 6'4", 300-pound huge guy.
Then he turns to this woman that tried to come and help
and starts to physically hurt her, got her in a bear hug,
is choking her.
[barking]
[Jessob] All of a sudden, she said the passenger,
who looked like a hitchhiker, a homeless guy,
comes and attacks the driver and saves her.
And, as I'm doing this interview,
I look across this two-lane farm road
and down walking on the other side of the road
was a guy with long hair, a bandana, a really big backpack,
and not to stereotype, but looked like a homeless hitchhiker.
- Can we talk to you? Do you mind? - What do you wanna talk about?
What happened today?
Well, went straight outta Dogtown.
Skateboarding, surfing it up…
The first thing he wanted to do was send a loving message
to whoever sees this interview. It's powerful. It gives me goosebumps.
He'd been through this crazy,
what to most people would be a traumatic situation,
and he looked right in the camera…
Before I say anything else, I wanna say
no matter what you've done, you deserve respect.
Even if you make mistakes, you're lovable,
and it doesn't matter your looks, skills, or age, size, or anything,
you're worthwhile. No one can ever take that away from you. Now…
He just had such a different perspective
of what he was supposed to do in that moment.
[hitchhiker] I look over. The guy's pinned there.
Buddy gets out. These two women are trying to help him.
He runs up, and he grabs one of them, man.
A guy that big can snap a woman's neck like a pencil stick.
So I fucking ran up behind him with a hatchet.
Smash! Smash! Smash!
Yeah.
Who would expect a hatchet-wielding hitchhiker
to be coming to save the day?
I was blown away. Absolutely blown away,
'cause you looked at him and he's rough around the edges,
and then you see
the treasure he truly was.
That woman was in danger.
He just finished, what looked like at the time, killing somebody.
If I hadn't done that, he would've killed more people.
[woman] Did it strike you as odd that he had a hatchet?
Did it-- Not really. I mean, I just--
You know, I figured being kind of a homeless transient,
a hatchet would be a good thing to have, you know.
He saw a woman that was in danger. "I'm gonna help her."
But how willing and able he was to use it on another person's skull,
maybe, yeah. That's kinda shocking.
[Jessob] How'd you get in his car? I was… I was hitchhiking.
Well, good thing I was hitchhiking.
Yeah, people say, "Don't hitchhike. This is what happens."
- Yeah, well, at least I was here. - [Jessob] Can I get your name?
- I'm Kai. - [Jessob] Can I get the spelling for it?
- Straight outta Dogtown. K-A-I. - [Jessob] Do you have a last name?
No, bro. I don't have anything.
As crazy as things got here, the best news is,
somehow, luckily, none of the injuries suffered are life-threatening,
and the guy driving that car is right where he belongs, in police custody.
In West Fresno, Jessob Reisbeck, KMPH News.
After I finished the interview, reporters from other stations came up to him.
and said, of course, "Can we talk to you?"
This guy was the most charismatic dude ever.
He's gonna talk to everyone. He wants everyone to see him.
For whatever reason, he said, "Nope. I'm not talking to anyone else," and left.
And when that happened, I knew.
Holy shit. We got something really special now,
because we're gonna be the only one with this interview.
[laughs]
When you look at a story, any story, if you're going to tell a story,
you need a villain,
you need an unlikely hero,
you need an amazing scenario, and you need someone in distress,
and this had all of that.
Yeah, it was fucking gnarly, man.
Holy shit. It was like the biggest wave I've ever ridden in my life.
We knew we had gold on our hands.
That night I decided I wanted the world to see the entire interview,
the six-plus minutes of interview,
because, up until this point, people had only been able to see
the minute-and-a-half piece that I'd put on the news.
So I put it on YouTube, I clicked "upload,"
and then I went to bed.
I woke up the next morning, and my world was different.
It was a game changer in my life, for sure, just uploading that video.
I had my own YouTube channel, and I had about 20 followers.
And I put it up when I got home, and I looked at it that night,
and it's like, "Oh, it's gotten about 20 hits."
"That's nice. That's average. Cool."
Jessob called me the next day. He's all, "Terry, dude!"
Just like, "Yeah, Jessob? What?"
He's like, "Have you seen your video?"
It's like, "Oh yeah, it was doing good. I think it was about at 20 or 30 people."
I thought it was good. He's like, "Dude, it's at, like, half a million."
I knew that day
that Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker was born.
Now, this stuff right here, I was driving…
- Smash! Smash! Smash! - [laughs]
- Smash! - Smash!
He literally has a hatchet in his hand.
I'm absolutely obsessed with this guy.
This guy's my fucking hero!
Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker.
Fuck yeah.
Every time you would refresh,
someone else had taken the video and reposted it,
and that had tens or hundreds of thousands of views.
So it was just literally like a snowball that rolled and rolled,
and the Internet just fed into it.
♪ I'm Kai ♪
[Jessob] There's dozens and dozens of different autotunes and different songs.
It was insane.
♪ Smash, smash, smash! ♪
I mean, the memes? Gimme a break, dude. That guy is a walking meme.
He might have started memes.
♪ People say, "Don't hitchhike" ♪
♪ Well, good thing I was hitchhiking ♪
♪ That woman was in danger ♪
♪ So I ran up behind him with a hatchet ♪
♪ Smash, smash, smash! ♪
♪ Yeah, yeah ♪
♪ If he'd started driving that car again ♪
♪ There'd be a hell of a lot Of bodies around here ♪
♪ Dude, that guy was fucking kooked ♪
♪ He can snap a woman's neck Like a pencil stick ♪
♪ So I started smashing him in the head ♪
♪ Smash, smash, smash! ♪
Axe-wielding hitchhikers.
[audience laughs]
I can't tell you how many times I've rolled up my windows
and sped past a hobo sharpening a hatchet.
When I saw Stephen Colbert do his skit,
I mean, I didn't watch Colbert that much until then,
and then I became an instant fan of his show. [chuckles]
For the first time in human history, people are saying,
"Boy, we sure are lucky
that homeless hitchhiker was carrying a hatchet."
Kai equalled ratings. It equalled ratings because he was fresh and interesting.
People liked him, and ratings equal money.
So everyone was wanting a piece of him, to jump on the Kai train, as it were.
My name is Brad Mulcahy.
In 2013, I was the human interest researcher
for the late-night television show Jimmy Kimmel Live.
[announcer] Ready or not, here's Jimmy Kimmel!
[Brad] My job is to find interesting stories
or interesting clips and bring them to rehearsal or email them to Jimmy
or to track down what Jimmy likes.
Then I try to find that person to get them on within 36 hours.
We tend to air things that are funny.
Leave Britney alone!
We especially like people who are genuine
and whose reaction to something unexpected is genuine.
And the best example that I can think of at the moment is Paul Vasquez,
who was the double rainbow guy.
So this gentleman is in Yosemite Park,
and one day in the park, he's filming a rainbow,
and as he's filming it, a second rainbow begins.
[Paul] Whoa! My God! Oh my God!
[laughs] Oh my God! Whoo!
And at that point, it only had tens of thousands of views.
And then once we get him on the show, it went up over 45 million.
Were you or were you not ingesting or inhaling some sort of illegal substance
when you made that--
Absolutely not. I was completely sober. In that video.
The first time I saw the video of Kai, it was intoxicating,
not to mention that he did genuinely help two human beings who were in peril.
And it was brilliant.
I went to rehearsal, and I believe I was told almost immediately,
"We'd like to see if you can find that gentleman."
Hey, buddy! Good boy.
Who's a good boy, baby?
Of course everybody wants to be famous, but who has that "it factor"?
What is that thing that is just so mesmerizing
that you can't take your eyes off somebody,
that is, like… "What are they gonna do next?"
One of the biggest shows that I had the privilege of working on
was Keeping Up with the Kardashians.
[announcer] Don't miss the season premiere of The Kardashians.
And I think the appeal with Kai was,
most people that are heroes are not homeless people.
This was somebody that came from a different walk of life
that could just open up new audiences
and expose people to a different world that they had never seen.
And there was something funny about him and kinda cute and sweet and innocent.
If anyone's watching this and they got a Mini Mal that they could lend a guy
with a wetsuit, I'd love to test out Mavericks.
He has that "it factor."
So I wanna find him.
Except how do you find someone that's homeless?
[gentle guitar music playing]
[Lisa] Where to start, right?
I mean, wow!
My first move was going onto Facebook,
and Kai had a profile, so I added him
and sent him a message that, you know, I wanted to find him
and I was at this production company.
What's step one?
I don't know.
And that's when I called the Fresno affiliate that aired the clip.
I speak to Jessob. It's like, "How do I get in touch with this guy?"
And Jessob, you know, "You can't."
Jessob was the gatekeeper.
Everyone around the world wanted a piece of this kid.
At one point, I remember deleting my emails.
Six minutes later,
six minutes, I had, like, 124 emails
from people in Japan, Australia,
East Coast, West Coast,
all the different talk shows you can imagine.
I knew they wanted to talk to him, to be the first person to tell his story.
But I also knew I was the only one with his email.
So I sent him a message,
and I just told him,
look, there's all these people that wanna literally make him rich and famous,
but I wanted to be the first one before all these opportunities.
I wanted to tell him about these opportunities
in an honest, fair way.
Subject, "Blowing Up."
"Hey bro, we'd love to do an interview with you
about all the craziness going on around the Internet and the world about you."
"The people wanna hear from you."
"We'd love to be the one that brings it to them."
"Hope all is good."
"Stay safe."
Everybody was trying to get a hold of him. I mean, this was a manhunt.
As this thing is getting bigger and bigger and bigger,
I knew that I had to talk to him again. I had to figure out more about him.
I had to tell his story.
Finally, he used someone's phone at a gas station and called me.
I was super stoked.
And then I said, "Where are you, and when can we come and talk to you?"
And he said something like, "Oh, well, you know, I'm up in Stockton."
Um, and even my boss said, "Do whatever you have to do."
"Get the kid a hotel room. Keep him somewhere so we can talk to him."
[man] Anytime you're on the road getting ready to interview somebody,
you get excited. But I think this was a little bit more excitement
because this is a guy that has gone viral, that everybody wants a piece of.
But nobody could get a hold of him except for one person in the entire world.
And that was Jessob.
[Jessob] The entire drive there,
I was talking to different people, doing different interviews.
It's nonstop. They're trying to get him. "I'm going to talk to him."
They wanna know where. I'm not telling them.
We were driving up to the hotel,
and I'm turning the corner, and I turn to Jessob. I was like,
"Isn't that Kai?" Jessob's like…
"There he is. Turn around. Let's go. We're getting him."
Uh, yeah, let's do this, in three...
Look who it is! We finally caught up with him.
It is the world sensation,
everybody's friend, and pretty much a world hero,
it's Kai. Kai, let me tell you this real quick.
You're like Batman, except for you don't have the Bat-Signal.
You know, Batman obviously has the spotlight--
And I'm not a filthy rich, spoiled fuck who looks down on everyone.
[Alex] I think the biggest difference between seeing him in the viral video
and being around him in person was that he was a loose cannon.
I felt like his energy was just a little bit crazy, you know?
He just had some weird energy around him
that was, like, you didn't know what he was gonna do next.
- You can bleep that, right? - That was awesome.
The first one-- Okay…
- [beatboxing] - [laughing]
He had such an endearing quality. There's so much charisma.
I don't know if I've met someone that has as much charisma as this guy.
This right here is one of my friends.
Her name's Joan Sewitt.
Now, on Saturday here,
some of these, uh… some of these policy enforcers up on over in…
This is Stockton.
They came on up with her with a gun.
Like, they pulled a gun on her.
That, to me, is fucking ridiculous. That is a vulgar display of power,
and not in a way that I think Phil Anselmo would appreciate.
He would fill a cart from a local store with goods and steal it.
But he would go outside and give it all away to people that needed it.
So it's like, "Well, shit. I don't even know how to look at that."
How did it make you feel, though, being this viral sensation,
being everyone's hero right now, Kai?
I'm not a virus. You kidding me?
Shit, I'm a sensation. I'm Kai.
We did the interview first, and then we need what's called B-roll.
"So what do you think would be a good shot of you?"
And he said, "There's a music shop over here."
"I can grab one of the guitars and play a song." We're like, "Sweet."
So here's one I wrote.
[Jessob] He plays this song, and it was phenomenal.
♪ I've never seen a beauty Like you before ♪
♪ Breathless kisses through the door ♪
♪ You got that shiny light Of fight in your eyes ♪
♪ You're the sunset That brings the twilight ♪
♪ Soft, orange kisses, forlorn misses ♪
♪ When you leave ♪
♪ Soft, orange kisses, well-worn dresses ♪
♪ That you leave ♪
[Jessob] Performed well, sung well.
The guitar playing was great.
You know, he even, like, performs it, you know?
At one point, the song says something like, you know,
"Take back your hood,"
and he, like, throws his bandana off at the perfect time.
♪ Pull back my hood And kiss me real good ♪
♪ And just move Get a little bit closer ♪
♪ And pull back, and pull back, you do ♪
♪ And just move ♪
♪ We'll feel this groove With the loving that we do ♪
♪ We'll feel this groove With the loving that we do, uh ♪
He's a great performer, and he's talented as heck.
Wow, this is another, you know, aspect of this guy that's pretty incredible.
He's willing to be a hero in a dangerous situation.
And he's also a really good musician.
- [Jessob] How do you know this guy? - The Internet, man.
He, uh… he hit some guy with an axe in the head.
He didn't know the scope of it at that point,
about how, you know, big his story had become.
He was starting to see it
because, I mean, people were already recognizing him
and asking him for pictures and autographs and stuff like that.
How'd you get up here?
Uh, hitchhiked. [chuckles]
- Sweet. - Yeah, bro.
- Hope you still have the hatchet. - No, I don't. They took it from me.
Oh, we need to get you a new hatchet, sir.
[Jessob] So we finished up filming, and then I said,
"Do you wanna eat?" He says, "I'll come and eat."
I just started laying out the options that he had,
everyone from East Coast to West Coast, then Jimmy Kimmel,
and the fricking Kardashian producers wanna give him his own show.
"Kai, he's trying to say you're famous now."
And you could see the lights kinda click on in Kai's head,
like, "Whoa, like, I'm famous. Like, what?"
I mean, there is no bigger brand than the Kardashians.
I could turn around and throw a dart and approach anybody
and entice them to wanna be a reality star.
He could be rich and famous and do anything he wants
if he wants it.
There were these comment cards on the table,
and they had, like, a little golf pencil with them.
And he's kind of playing with the pencil as I'm talking to him.
I'm like, "Kai, are you listening to me?"
"Listen to all these things I'm telling you."
"This is unbelievable. You could be an overnight millionaire."
He just continues to play with this pencil.
He's like, "I kinda just want to go to the Bay Area and smoke weed."
All of the things in the world on one side,
smoke weed on the other side.
This is the fork in the road we've come to with Kai.
And all of a sudden, he picks it up, throws it,
and it spins around and it falls,
and he looks at me, and he goes,
"I'm gonna go to the Bay Area and smoke weed."
"Are you… kidding me right now? Wait a second."
"You're telling me that he is not gonna meet with us
because he spun some pencil?"
I mean, you have to think if you're Kai, like,
"What do I have to lose?"
"This has to change my life somehow. Why not?"
"Hey, just go back to him and say
we'll send him a whole limo filled with weed."
"Look, dude, here's their counter-offer."
Kai said, "Okay."
Alex and I jump in our news vehicle,
and we head back to Fresno with the story that we got.
KMPH is still the only TV station in the world to talk to Kai,
but he is getting offers for new television adventures,
like, well, you wouldn't believe.
So chances are you will be seeing him somewhere new very soon.
At this point, everybody wants to get a hold of Kai,
so Jessob says, "Hey, listen. Kai's willing to do something with you,
but also The Kimmel Show wants him."
"So, hey, that's gotta be good for us. Like, we're really onto something."
"If the guy that we wanna make a show with is then gonna be on Kimmel,
it can only make him more popular, so that's gotta be good for us."
We couldn't put him on the train,
we couldn't put him on a plane because he has no ID.
So somebody has to put hands on this guy
and then drive him 500 miles.
So we're bringing him to the show,
and my boss said, "We're sending JR with you."
"He knows Northern California."
[JR] I had no idea who this Kai guy was.
So I watched the viral YouTube video,
and I realized, gosh, I guess he's got some endearing qualities,
but he also just made the news
for bludgeoning somebody over the head with a deadly weapon.
This is gonna be interesting.
It seems most reality production companies
are looking for the next big pop-culture icon to emerge,
and after Simple Life with Paris Hilton went away,
they needed a new Paris Hilton, and Kim Kardashian became that.
So it's a constant look for the next big thing.
Kai had communicated with Jessob
that he had hitchhiked his way down to Santa Rosa.
And, uh, here we go. Giddy up.
400,000 more of me.
And then there's all the ones who are just struggling to get up,
but we're helping them.
My initial impression is, oh my God, he smelled of alcohol.
This guy is in-tox-i-cated.
First thing he does is he sees some guy who looked like he "had less than he did."
He takes the backpack off his back,
and he gave him the backpack.
You know, I thought, like, wow. Okay, that's pretty good.
[JR] Kimmel's gonna do his thing. That'll just be a one-off.
What we need to make sure that we do,
before anybody else in Hollywood can get their grubby hands on him,
"Here's the contract. Sign here."
And I remember that he signed it in hieroglyphics.
It took him ten minutes to sign his name, and it was just gibberish.
I don't know how else to describe it. It was like a cave drawing.
That was his "signature" agreeing to be on the show.
So theoretically I guess we had our "deal."
Mission accomplished.
[Lisa] We weren't really sure exactly what this show was gonna be,
but I think what people saw at my company
was that Kai could be a gateway into a world that we never saw.
Homeless people living happily on the streets.
The show would be batshit crazy, I know that!
If Kai is, like, the lead man, it's gonna be nuts.
[rhythmic tapping]
[Jessob] I remember telling her, "Look, get ready."
"This is not easy."
"He's a great guy, and he's a crazy guy,
but it's not unicorns and rainbows when you hang out with this guy."
"It is exhausting. It's hard. So just be ready."
"And if you need me, call me. Whatever I can do…"
"Give me the phone. I'll talk to him if anything's going on."
[Brad] It's eight o'clock, and I'm standing outside
the Roosevelt Hotel on Hollywood Boulevard.
Lisa pulls up with Kai,
and I see Lisa for the first time,
and I see Kai for the first time.
And Lisa looks down, and she says,
"Can you watch him for a minute? I'm gonna go valet the car,"
which is just straight around the corner, and I say, "No problem."
And Kai, he gets out of the car. It's me and him on Hollywood Boulevard,
and people are recognizing him almost immediately.
People are driving by, and they're saying, "Smash! Smash! Smash!"
So I'm just standing there. I'm not watching him. He's an adult.
Lisa comes back around the corner,
and I could see her, and she looks at me and she stops.
Kai has his pants pulled down…
And he's urinating on Julio Iglesias's star
directly in front of this hotel.
And I was like, "I fucking told you to keep an eye on him."
And her face was like, "I was just with this guy for 26 hours."
"You couldn't do five minutes?"
We were walking into the Roosevelt Hotel, where Marilyn Monroe used to live,
where they used to hold the Oscars, and up comes Kai.
[JR] We got into the room,
and he immediately was overjoyed to see a minibar.
You know, these were not airplane-sized bottles of liquor.
They were enormous bottles of liquor.
Immediately, he cracked open a Jack Daniels
and just started gulping it down.
Gulp. Gulp. Gulp. Gulp.
We're not talking pouring it into a glass. We're talking, like, lunatic style.
He was out of control.
I've been around a lot of celebrities,
and I've seen some of them act a little crazy.
But nothing like this.
So our next move is, I think we're gonna get something to eat.
He takes his skateboard. We go down to the lobby of this hotel,
and the lobby of this hotel, it's fancy.
There's fancy people here. It's Saturday night on Hollywood Boulevard.
And it's, like, cobblestone.
So he takes his skateboard, rides across, and he goes,
boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom,
all the way across. We get outside.
Three seconds later, the security comes out
and says, "He can't come back in."
"You're all out." And I'm thinking,
"They don't even know about him peeing in front of the building."
They meant business. "Sir, you are outta here."
And before I know it, we are out on the sidewalk.
And then he took off running ahead of us and pulled out a huge knife
and tried to throw it into the ground.
Okay, like, this is a little scary.
At first, we were intrigued by Kai and finding him and all that stuff,
and… and we were excited about what we were doing.
And now we're kinda like, "Are we okay?"
[JR] If what they were after, my production company,
was this carefree, happy, home-free hitchhiker,
who's looking out for the underdog, that was not what this guy was projecting.
They kicked me out for skateboarding in the middle of the thing
- and drinking a bottle of JD. - [woman] This was-- When was this?
And I peed on the Walk of Fame,
and all these publicity agents are like, "No! Stop! Stop! Stop! Stop!"
I was like… [imitates peeing sound]
I'm kickin' it legit.
[JR] I was texting, "You are not gonna wanna do a reality show with this guy,"
but I guess from their perspective,
it was more just like, "How bad can this guy really be?"
"Just get him down here."
"We can talk to him ourselves and form our own opinion."
I don't know why I took it upon myself to think,
"I'm responsible for him. I'm his babysitter,
and I need to make sure that he gets on The Kimmel Show."
Shouldn't it just be his responsibility or Brad's responsibility?
But all of a sudden, I'm, like, huh,
I don't know if it's a wild or stupid idea.
I had him stay at my house.
It's just the two of us.
He was polite.
Played the guitar.
[singing]
[Lisa] But there was something kinda dangerous about him,
now we're starting to think.
Monday, I'm done. Brad can have him, do what he wants with him.
I'm not even thinking about our TV show, if we're gonna do anything with it or not.
He didn't seem particularly, uh, excited that he was gonna be on The Kimmel Show.
At least he was not letting on that he was overly excited about it.
Lisa and her production team take Kai to the studio.
They pull up and in the back parking lot,
there's this really big Jimmy Kimmel Live! sign
stretched across this chain-link fence. They get out of the car.
First thing Kai does, walks up to the sign and pisses on the sign.
'Course, everyone's like, "What the fuck are you…" [laughs]
"What are you doing?" Security guard comes over.
"What are you doing, bro? You can't do that,"
all this stuff that, yes, of course, you can't do that, Kai.
You can't do that. They get him, you know, wrangle him, stop him.
He goes inside. Uh, Jimmy's waiting there.
They take their pictures, do whatever they gotta do,
and then Jimmy hands Kai an envelope.
Inside, there was, like, $500 in it.
Kai takes it and gives it to the security guard
and says, "I'm sorry for pissing on the sign."
I remember just thinking, "There's no way in hell
he's actually gonna be on The Jimmy Kimmel Show."
They're gonna see that he's crazy. They're gonna see that he's unstable.
They're gonna see that he's bad news, and the idea's gonna be jettisoned,
and there's no way he's actually gonna be on the show.
So we're in the green room,
and we're 90 minutes away from the show,
and the police show up.
Hello. There's no picture-taking in here, okay?
Thank you very much. All right, unless you wanna go…
All right, now go on your way. Thanks a lot.
No question, when the police walked in, I knew who they were there for.
And they came, and they grabbed him, and they took him.
And I… I've never been more crestfallen.
My name is Jeff Stricker, and in February 2013,
I was a homicide detective with the Fresno County Sheriff's Office.
Jett McBride, who was the driver of the vehicle
that smashed into Rayshawn Neely, the PG&E worker, was in custody,
and Kai was our key witness.
The district attorney investigators didn't know where Kai was,
but social media being what it is these days,
Jimmy Kimmel tweeted,
"Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker will be on the show."
So they left Fresno and headed on over to LA to meet with Kai.
Some people weren't disappointed that the police came and got him.
Some people were like, "Well, that figures," and--
But not me. Not me.
I was wrong about this the whole time. I was like, "We gotta get him back."
[reporter] The Fresno County District Attorney's Office enlisted
the help of the Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department
to track Kai down at the Jimmy Kimmel studio
and take him into custody.
The DA's office served him with a subpoena
and says it needed to get a statement about the attempted murder hate crime
that started this whole thing because he is the key witness.
We're all sweating bullets, you know, probably especially Brad.
Kai's social media is blowing up at this point.
I can't even tell you how many hits he's getting.
It's, like, millions.
[Brad] Eventually, about 30 minutes before the show,
the police brought him back. But here's the thing.
Everything I do, the lead-up, the build-up,
the calling, getting people to agree,
the only thing I don't have control of is what everybody sees.
What's on the air. That's the only part I have no control of, what gets on TV.
And that's only what everybody remembers.
Jessob's in the front row.
I'm pacing in the green room.
We both know, more than other people know,
how sideways this can go.
I'm about to pick up a very special hitchhiker.
Ladies and gentlemen, please say hi to Kai.
Kai, jump in the car.
Kai! Not on the car, in the car.
I don't know if the car can hold your weight. All right, there we go.
- [Kai] Keep your eye on the road, man. - [laughing]
Holy [bleep].
Well, welcome, Kai. Welcome. How are you?
- Excellent. How about yourself? - I'm doing good.
I had very little confidence it would go well for him.
But, man, I was rooting for him. I was rooting for him.
They described you in the video as "homeless hitchhiker,"
but you don't like the word "homeless."
- Home-free. - Home-free.
It's the land of the free and the home of the brave.
You don't want to have a home, correct?
What the hell are you talking about? I am home.
- [laughs] Yeah, I see. - [bleep]
So anywhere you are is your home. That's your philosophy.
Jimmy handled it so well 'cause Kai had, you know,
in typical Kai fashion, he had some very bizarre answers
and said some very bizarre things, but Jimmy just rolled with it.
A lot of people are calling you a hero because you did.
You thwarted that crazy guy, right?
There's not so much difference between him and who they sell as Jesus anyways.
Well, I don't know. I haven't met him.
Did he have a beard?
- No. - [laughs]
No, no, he was… he was a fat, rich, white guy.
Now, um, you, uh… Obviously, millions of people have seen--
Nothing against fat, rich people.
No, fat, white people, yeah.
Yeah, you're sitting next to one. Um…
It's great by Jimmy. I've seen him do this hundreds, hundreds of times,
where the… That is an example of Kai trying to be funny,
and Jimmy knowing how to stop it,
say something self-deprecating and move on to the next point.
God, he's good.
Let's step outside the car for one second,
because I don't know if you're gonna give this away immediately,
but we have something for you.
There you go. A Mini Mal surfboard and a wetsuit.
Do with it as you will. If you choose to give it away, then so be it.
[laughing] I can't tell you how many people got a hold of me
trying to get him a surfboard and a wetsuit
and all those things he wanted. Just from that line,
he had hundreds and hundreds of offers. Shit, Jimmy Kimmel gave it to him.
You all right, Kai?
- [cheering and applause] - [Jimmy laughs]
All right. Kai the Hitchhiker, everybody.
Thanks, Kai.
And thanks for not killing me with a hatchet.
Hey, everybody, we got a great show tonight.
Carl Reiner is here. We'll be right back with Mindy Kaling.
The whole world was open to him at this point. It really, really was.
So we ask him back the next day to do, like, movie reviews.
[exhaling rhythmically]
Yeah, okay. Let's watch movies.
[Brad] The next day, we saw a different side of Kai.
He had no possibility of concentrating on anything.
Zero Dark Thirty
is about how we're being told to keep our bodies alkaline
and being fed fluoride in the water.
"Kai, just… just… just watch the movie."
I think at some point, we're like, "Just watch the trailer."
It's two minutes and 32 seconds. He couldn't get through it.
So if they laid a chemtrail over the side of your house
with scopolamine,
and try to get y'all to act like [bleep] zombies
so they could slay y'all and take your houses,
then that'd be a good [bleep] way of doing it.
We were barely able to corral him for those eight minutes on that one night.
Him doing a reality TV show would never have worked.
Osama bin Laden was a sheikh.
He never would've done it. So he's gonna show up at 3:45
at some doughnut shop and fake some scene that they wrote?
There's no chance. There's no chance he's doing that.
I mean, no chance.
What a bizarre thing. That would've never worked.
After Kimmel, Jimmy promised him he would take him wherever he'd wanna go.
He said he wanted to go back north and Jimmy lived up to his word.
♪ Got my temperature rising ♪
♪ Yeah, they turning up the heat ♪
From being in a world where nobody is listening to you,
now he's in this echo chamber of everything he says,
there's at least a thousand people saying, "That's a great idea."
[woman] I wanna hand hug with you.
- Hand hug? - [woman] Hand hug.
- Thank you so much. - You're welcome.
[man] This notoriety you've developed, is this helping you with women?
Are you dating these days?
[Kai] Am I dating?
[man] Are women coming up to you in a way they haven't before?
[Kai] Uh, yeah, this one girl was trying to see if it was me,
and she walked into a stop sign the other day.
She was kinda mortified.
I gave her a big hug, and she was like, "You are Kai!"
He was not hard to keep track of because he was living the dream.
He was pretty damn famous. He'd pop up on different videos of surfing.
Let's go catch a wave.
People wanted him to come perform, playing gigs. At one point,
one of Justin Bieber's people called and asked about him.
It takes one little collab with Justin Bieber
to make a career, I'm sure.
[Brad] People were happy to see him at that point.
If he rolled into your town and he just posted, "Went to the local library"
and it's on Facebook and you were 17 to 23 years old,
you're like, "I'll come pick you up. Why not?"
You just saw him save somebody. You just saw him on TV.
There wasn't anything about him at that point that would caution you against it.
[reporter] This made Kai an Internet sensation.
He became a huge hit.
- Or you should say "a huge smash." - Oh yeah!
[harmonica music playing]
So here's the car that Jett McBride and Kai were traveling in
on the day of the incident.
There's still blood on it.
Surprised that anyone would even survive this.
I didn't really keep track of where Kai was going,
what he was doing, all the attention he was getting,
the talk shows.
I didn't care. I just wanted to make sure that he was back
for the pretrial hearing for Jett McBride.
Kai was our key witness.
He was in the car when they crashed and injured Rayshawn Neely.
He knows what they were talking about. He had all the information.
You couldn't ask for a better witness being in that spot.
- Hey, Tanya. - [Tanya chuckles]
Hey, peeps, how's it going?
In court, details started to emerge.
The picture started to come into focus.
[reporter] Tanya Baker testified that McBride attacked her
while she tried to rescue Neely.
He put me into a bear hug and was hitting me on the back.
[reporter] Then Kai stepped in with his hatchet,
hitting McBride over the head not once, not twice, but three times.
[Alex] Knowing who Kai was,
part of me wondered what actually happened that day in Fresno.
Was that actually him saving the day?
Was this him being the hero or not?
With no hatchet in hand this time,
the man known as Kai took the stand,
not before causing a few observers to chuckle.
Just a moment. Listen to the clerk as she states the oath to you
so that you can respond to it. You only need one hand up, the right hand.
Kai was asked if he rolled a joint with Jett McBride.
Kai said he did, and in my interview with Jett,
he was suggesting that Kai made the assumption
that they were both ghosts after they were smoking their marijuana,
and Kai said, "I bet we could drive right through that truck right now
and nobody would even see us."
He's not perfectly clean in this incident. He's been made out to be a hero.
Um, what he did to stop him from attacking Tanya is commendable,
but he does have some culpability in this.
[reporter] Kai then testified that just before the crash,
McBride proudly told him about raping a 14-year-old girl.
He's like, "Well, I've come to realize I'm Jesus Christ,
and I get away with anything I want to. Watch this."
And I look up, and there's a whole crew of construction people in front of me.
Most of them jumped aside. One dude got pinned underneath.
Kai says McBride then turned on several people who tried to help.
He's still holding onto her, so I smashed him again.
And he's still holding onto her hair. I was like [bleep].
I smashed him real good and hard.
Initially, when Kai was hitting him,
he was using the dull part, the back of the hatchet.
And a third strike, he turned it around and used the sharp edge of it.
[Brad] Hitting someone in the head with a hatchet three times,
blunt side or not,
is violent.
And yet because of his demeanor,
for me, it got clouded.
And all I saw was the kind Kai.
The violent Kai, who showed himself to me right there,
I didn't see it.
In the original interview, when I first talked to him,
I asked him at one point, "Have you ever been a part of something like this?"
Well, this one time, I was in an orchard,
and this fucking guy starts beating on this woman who he calls "his."
So I walked on over, and I started smashing him in the head.
You see all these teeth marks right here, for the camera?
Yeah, I started smashing him in the head and the teeth, busted out all his teeth.
Yeah, he saved a woman. At the same time, it's a little extreme,
bragging about your knuckles still being scarred
and not just stopping the assault, but beating the dude, you know?
It's the same thing when I asked him about hitting the driver with the hatchet.
It's like, "Yeah, I cleaved him."
He was like, "Yes, I'm proud of it, and it felt good."
It was almost kind of a relief to him, and that's a scary thought.
[Jessob] What are you planning on doing now that the attention is on you?
Because these things do have a shelf life. It's gonna start to fade away.
[Kai] This badass mother[bleep] doesn't come with a shelf life.
I don't fit on a shelf. Yeah, yeah, I don't fit inside time limits either.
People are actually interested in not just the fact
that I smashed a dude with a hatchet who was trying to mass murder some people,
but also in that I play some legit music.
I play punk. I play grind.
I play, like, serious metal. I can play, like, six different instruments.
There's been recording offers for me from places like Greenhouse Records
and, uh, Universal.
My name is Gabriel Francisco.
I'm the lead singer of a band called the Redcoats.
♪ Hello ♪
♪ Who are you? ♪
♪ Where am I And where you going to? ♪
♪ I said hello… ♪
[Gabriel] I was asked, "Do you wanna do a show with Kai?"
I thought, "Like Kai Kai? Like, the hatchet guy?"
I thought, "This guy is ridiculous." [chuckles]
But then I saw a video of him playing the acoustic guitar…
and I thought, "It's not bad."
♪ I've never seen A beauty like you before ♪
♪ Breathless kisses through the door… ♪
He has a nice voice and just sounds like a campfire guy with an acoustic guitar.
We said yes because we wanted Kai's crowd. [chuckles]
We wanted who was gonna come out to see Kai,
and then we wanted to kill it and win them over.
I mean, that's what you do. It's like Rock Band.
"You made 20 fans tonight." "You made 50 fans."
[man] Kai came in to Fresno like a big ball of fire.
He comes in for soundcheck,
and I feel I'm a good judge of character. I just was put off by him pretty quickly
just the way he talked, interacted, and treated my staff.
He'd walk up to the bar almost demanding, like, a free beer
because of who he was, and it's like, "Yeah, you know, we don't do that here."
But then he would go out and get somebody to buy his drinks for him.
[Gabriel] We do soundcheck, and he was talking about that day,
the day that he hit the man on the head with a hatchet.
And in Kai's words, he's bragging,
he says, "Oh man, you know, this guy picks me up,
and I offer him a joint, and he can't even handle his shit, man,
because, like, I hand him a joint,
but what he didn't know was it was laced, man. And it was…"
He starts listing drugs. I don't know what they are.
But what Kai explicitly told me was that he handed this man a laced joint,
and then Kai proceeds to tell me,
"Then he starts flipping out over nothing 'cause he can't handle his shit,"
and he's laughing.
And I'm horrified, and he's telling a group of people,
and they're all laughing. No one's listening to what he's saying,
and I'm standing there, and I'm thinking, "Oh my God."
"Kai just confessed something huge."
"He drugged this guy?"
That's like starting a fire,
and then putting the fire out and being called a hero.
So I understand that the police have tested the marijuana
and they did toxicology on the driver.
But, honestly, if you think about this,
what if there's something that just didn't show up on the test?
And then he was talking about life and having a positive attitude.
"You just gotta go through, man," and it's very hippie,
and then, out of nowhere, he said,
"Unless some old man fucks you in the ass,
and you have to keep it real and take him out."
And it was so bizarre.
And then he, like a switch, went back to,
"Everything's fine," and everybody kinda just accepted that.
And that was another one of those things where I thought, "What just happened?"
And I went inside, and I was kind of shaken
and going, "I have to play this show now with this knowledge,"
and our drummer's mom, who's a photographer,
says, "Gabe, get next to Kai. Come take a picture."
And I thought, "Oh my God."
"I don't wanna be seen with this man when all of this comes out,"
'cause I was thinking, "This is gonna come out."
"This is gonna be huge."
And it never did.
♪ Step it up You gotta jump away first ♪
[Gabriel] I honestly don't even remember staying for Kai's show.
I was kinda shaken up that night by how he behaved.
♪ If you wake up dead Bullets in your head ♪
♪ I'm killing you, one by fucking one ♪
♪ Not regretting a thing Of what I've done ♪
[Tony] I ended up kicking him out after his performance
for urinating on one of our bushes.
It's like, "Yeah, you don't come and disrespect our place like this."
He burned bridges.
It's a big city, but it has a small-town feel.
If you get burned in this town, word spreads.
My last words were, "Get the fuck outta here."
When I look at Kai, I don't know what his headspace is.
I don't know how healthy his headspace is.
But I think that living carefree and lawlessly for so long,
he didn't have a sense of consequences.
People gave him a lot of opportunity,
and I think he got in that mindset, like,
"This is Kai's world now," you know?
Because there was a lot of people filling his head
with things he can do and get away with, and maybe that backfired a little bit.
[man] So I'm sure you know
who Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker is by now.
He is all over YouTube.
He's everybody's favorite hero right now, but, uh, I actually met him.
Are you his agent?
Am I his agent? No, I don't have, nor am I had by anybody.
But no matter what you've done, you deserve respect.
No matter your looks or your skills, you're worthwhile.
No, this is for everyone.
And it doesn't matter, like, if you make mistakes,
you're still lovable. There's four different types of love.
There's putting up with somebody. There's liking somebody.
There's, then, like, romantically liking somebody,
and there's, like, actually be willing to kill somebody else for somebody.
Like, sacrificial love.
[Jessob] The Kimmel Show was 100% the peak.
The viral fame started, and it just snowballed and snowballed,
so the fame was growing. It was more fun.
More things were happening for Kai, and things were getting more amazing.
Then all of a sudden, Jimmy Kimmel's here, 'cause it was the best, and then…
slowly just came down and…
[Brad] For most people, what they know of him is something maybe we wanna be.
Maybe many of us don't want the responsibilities we have,
the bills and the cars and the insurance and the property taxes,
and this guy was living that life without those responsibilities,
and it was going well.
And then… then it didn't.
It's a much more sad existence
than maybe the exhilarating or free experience people think.
[siren blares]
Friday, May 10th, 2013,
a little over three months after, uh, the incident
that started this whole incredible journey,
he shows up in New York City
and posted this disturbing and, um, ominous Facebook post.
He talked about this being his Mother's Day message,
and it's not what you would expect from a Mother's Day message.
It reads,
"First memories I was in a crib and 'family' was fussin over me."
"But I kept getting told that 'I had a demon.'"
"I would get locked in a room for 20 hours a day
with a little porta potty camp toilet in the corner of the room."
"Then after that my mouth filled with hot pepper and soap
for yelling fuck you at the top of my lungs."
Signing off, "happy Mother's Day."
Huh.
And, of course, you know, I remember when I met him
for the first time after the original incident in Stockton,
and we sat down for that lengthy interview,
he definitely disclosed
some really, really terrible things that happened to him.
And, you know, obviously in the medium I was working in, local news,
you can't put a lot of that stuff on TV.
I just turned 17 on the road.
There was this guy, and he held me down,
and then he, like, hit me a couple times, and he started choking me.
Uh, he turned me over and he pulled my pants down and started raping me.
As this was happening and Kai was laying on the ground,
that's when he said, you know, he looked up to the sky
and, uh, saw this crow fly over in that moment
and told him, "Get up, fight for yourself, and run."
And that's what he did, and he got away from the guy.
Um, and, you know, I don't know if he saw that guy again
or if that guy ever got in trouble for it,
but, um, you know, a lot of it seems hard to believe,
but, you know, I'm in no place to tell him it didn't happen.
So all I'm left to believe is that it happened.
Tell me more.
Oh, bro. Okay, you want me to start from when I was a kid?
I was locked in a cage for fucking four years
and treated like an animal.
Uh, they installed a lock on the door that went from the outside in
so that they could sit and watch TV and fuck and shit.
You get kinda jaded with interviews,
and you kinda have, like, a truth meter on if what they're saying is accurate,
and I didn't know if it was 100% true.
But even if, like, 50% of what he was saying was true,
he had a horrible, horrible childhood.
My name's Jeremy McGillivary Wolfe, and I'm Kai's first cousin.
He was my brother, basically.
Seeing him on Kimmel and that, just wow. This guy's going viral big-time,
and I was in shock, like, the whole time.
I'm still in shock to this day, to tell you the truth.
This was someone I grew up with giving this outrageous interview.
But I never knew him as Kai, not once. I just knew him as Caleb.
I heard Kai for the first time during the YouTube video.
I don't have any family.
Like, as far as anybody I grew up with is concerned, I'm already dead.
So, whatever.
I felt bad after he said that, and, like, we care about you, you know?
You shouldn't feel that way. We always did.
Like, no matter if we have an argument, the love doesn't stop there.
Caleb's parents had split up when he was four.
Growing up, he was loud.
He was funny and mischievous.
Very mischievous.
I was able to act like a boy,
and I was able to go outside and play.
Caleb wasn't given that privilege.
He was kept at home.
His mom locked him in a room for quite some time,
and when… She tried to lock me in a room as well.
We had just finished supper. It was summertime,
and the window was open,
so you could hear kids still playing outside.
But there was dark blankets on the window,
so it was completely blacked out to make it look like it was night.
So we knew he had it difficult.
This one time, he tried to start a fire in his house,
and then, not long after, his mom decided that she couldn't cope with him anymore.
He was 13 when he went to Bosco Homes,
which is a place where they take troubled teens, I guess,
that, um, got in trouble in their youth and had no home
or just come from families that didn't want them, I guess.
Um, if you're still watching this,
that means that you obviously like what you see,
so that's very nice and very pretty.
You may notice that my eyes seem very dark.
In fact, maybe the whole picture seems dark right now.
Something I think Madame Guyon called "the dark night of the soul."
[Jeremy] The littlest thing would trigger him.
Caleb didn't realize whether you were laughing with him
or you were laughing at him,
and he would get so angry if he thought you were teasing him or making fun of him.
He would go into these little rages,
and then snap outta them.
♪ When I was four ♪
♪ I had a lighter ♪
♪ Tried to burn my parent's house Right to the ground… ♪
I honestly believe Caleb has, like, mental… mental issues
because he seems well,
but when it comes to a certain situation of pressure,
you either become a diamond or you get crushed.
And in this case, Caleb gets crushed.
♪ I mean, it's like ♪
[chuckles]
♪ We all wild and feral inside ♪
♪ Ain't nothin' That you gotta try and hide ♪
I'm Shirley. I'm Caleb's mother.
He's also known as Kai, and I go by the given name
because of what it means. Bold and courageous.
I didn't ever lock him in a room.
Like, "lock him in a room."
Um, I had to put, uh, for a short period of time,
uh, the ability… stop the ability of him getting out of the room too early
because he was a free spirit
and would get up earlier than I did and get into stuff that could harm him
and, being a responsible parent, needed to not allow that to happen.
And it was for a short period of time.
For his best interest and the, you know, safety, you know, of a little guy.
Not really understanding what's going on,
the medical field wondered if he, you know, had ADHD and things like that.
But kind of in the end,
there wasn't actually one diagnosis that was anything.
It was kind of their grasp at, "How do we… How do we help?"
"How do we do this? How do we navigate this?"
And… And time…
Time did it.
Smash! Smash!
- Smash! - Is that really you?
- Oh yeah. - Dude, come here, please. Please.
Hey, smash!
Can you buy me a bottle if you can take 17 pictures of me?
- This is a video. We'll give you a beer. - Smash guy!
- Smash! - Smash!
- Oh shit!
Smash! Smash!
- Smash! - Fucking hero right here.
- Smash! - [man] Oh!
[indistinct chatter]
I didn't realize he had become very famous,
and there's real, genuine people out there who wanted to reach out
and say, "Way to go, buddy," and, "Hey, we're here for you."
And I don't think that part was necessarily bad.
Loves people. Very much an outgoing person.
But I was a bit concerned because he's a very trusting person,
and I know that not everybody should be trusted.
"Are you the real Kai? Are you the real Kai? Is that really you?"
"Did that really happen?"
And it's, like, if you was a lot bigger than you are,
I'd just reach out, and I'd be like, "Smack!"
"Does that feel real?"
Caleb is a person who's always led with his heart.
And because of that, he's very trusting.
I'm not sure that's always healthy for people,
and I certainly see in the situation with my son
where I'm not sure it was the best, um,
in that it… I think it put him in a situation that possibly set him up.
[woman] What do you mean?
As in that he was trusting the wrong people.
[reporter] Concerns this morning in a New Jersey neighborhood
as police try to solve the killing of a well-known attorney.
The 73-year-old victim was discovered inside his home
on Starlite Drive in Clark.
That's where Joseph Galfy lived for the past 15 years.
Friends knew something was wrong when Galfy didn't show up for work Monday.
They called 911, and police found him inside his home beaten to death.
I'm Bob Ellenport, friend of Joe Galfy, my backyard neighbor.
I received a phone call from Joe Galfy's secretary,
and it said that Joe was scheduled to be in court,
and he didn't show up,
and she couldn't reach him on his, uh, cell phone.
Could I check and see if anyone was home?
And so I walked over
and saw that the Sunday newspaper
and the Monday newspaper were still on Joe's front stoop.
[man] Joseph Galfy's New York Times was still on the front porch.
That was kind of odd because he was a guy who stuck to his schedule.
He was, uh, somebody who picked up his paper every morning.
So the fact that it was there was concerning enough
to call the police to do a welfare check.
[man] The home itself,
everything looked in place,
nothing ransacked.
But as they go room to room and eventually get to the master bedroom
is where they discover Joe Galfy's lifeless body.
He's on the floor, you know, just clothed in underwear and socks,
lying in a pool of blood.
Once you go into a house, basically any house,
you're looking for signs of a struggle.
Were things out of place? Were drawers ransacked?
Things toppled over?
But this house didn't have any of that.
This house was very neat, very organized. There was no forced entry.
But then in the family room,
there's a laptop on a stand next to a chair,
and under the computer is a phone number
with the name "Lawrence Kai."
We didn't know who Kai was until we googled him.
And up popped a video.
And in the video, he had a hatchet,
and he described exactly what he was doing,
and I believe it was, "Bam! Bam! Bam!"
Made you stop and think.
Could he be responsible for something like this?
So as we're scouring the master bedroom where… where Mr. Galfy's body was found,
one of the detectives brought to my attention a train ticket,
and the date of the ticket was the day before.
Sunday. It was Mother's Day, 9:38 a.m.
So we sent people to the train station to see if there's video.
And we're looking to see if we could see the deceased Mr. Galfy.
[Rob] We don't get video right away oftentimes,
but in this case, we did.
And in the video, you could see Mr. Galfy,
and you can clearly see him purchase a ticket,
and he takes the ticket, and he turns, and he gives it to somebody off-camera.
And you can see it's another male, longish hair,
sorta curly, with a backpack, and they're waiting for the train to come.
[Dean] So we have this information on this Internet phenom,
Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker,
as I think they named him out in California.
And we're looking at this video of New Jersey Transit
and saying to ourselves, "Is this possible?"
"Is this the same guy out in California?"
So a call was made
to the Fresno, California police department.
I talked to this detective who has a pretty heavy East Coast accent.
He says, "Hey, we're looking for a guy."
"Uh, he might be involved in a murder, but we're not sure at this point."
"It's some homeless guy. He was in Fresno a while back,"
and I say, "Kai? Are you looking for Kai?"
And he's like, "Give me all the information you have,"
so I get him everything I have.
And when we gave him the name we had, Lawrence Kai,
they said, "Oh yeah, we know him as Kai, but his name is Caleb McGillvary."
He kinda puts the phone away, and I can hear him yell to the room, like,
"Hey, we finally found the motherfucker!"
You know, it was an a-ha moment for us. It was, "Bingo. I think we have the guy."
And we learned from them that this guy's a nomad.
He lives off the earth.
He lives off the kindness of others.
He's an opportunist.
So the chance of him traveling cross-country
and being in New York is likely.
It gave us further confirmation that this guy, Kai, is our suspect.
[Rob] So now we had to find Kai
He had a phone, but that was dead.
So then it was out to the public. We released a press statement.
Breaking news. Minutes ago, we learned who police are searching for
in the murder of a lawyer in Clark, New Jersey.
Wait until you hear who they are looking for.
Caleb Lawrence McGillvary.
You might also know him as Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker.
He should be considered armed and dangerous.
They don't know where he is.
He relies on the generosity of strangers for food and lodging.
Remember, he's a hitchhiker. He could be anywhere.
Will he try to kill again? Will he kill again?
The thrill of the hunt is on.
[Jessob] I immediately reached out to him.
I wanna talk to him and figure out what the fuck is going on.
When you find out that the authorities are, you know, looking for someone
that you've kind of grown to care about and you have a nice relationship with,
now they're looking, you know, at him for murder,
I'm a mental mess.
[Shirley] One of my sons that lived close to me came to the door.
I said, "How are you doing?" He said, "Mom, have you heard?"
I said, "Have I heard what?"
He said, "Have you heard that Caleb's wanted for murder?"
And I'm like,
"Nope, haven't heard that. Crap, what happened?"
My name is Ted Romankow. I'm the Union County prosecutor.
Uh, we're here today to announce that an arrest warrant has been issued
for the arrest of, uh, Caleb, uh, McGillvary.
We felt he was dangerous. I mean, here's a man who was…
He attacked someone in California with a hatchet.
He didn't know that driver more than a few hours,
and he attacked him.
And he was roaming around our area somewhere,
and we thought he was an extremely dangerous character,
so we advised the public of that.
We don't know where he is, but we do know
that this man is used to being on the road,
and he is considered dangerous.
Make no mistake about it.
He is considered armed and dangerous.
[Lisa] My first thought is, like,
"Holy fucking shit. Like, this guy stayed at my house."
"I could've been killed. You know, something could've happened."
I thought, "Are the police even gonna find this guy?"
'Cause he can easily disappear.
I knew that Kai as a witness was hard to track down,
and I kinda had some sympathy for the detectives with,
"How are they gonna track him down as a suspect?"
I got flooded with emails, flooded with messages,
because we're always gonna be linked.
And it sucked.
I mean, it sucked
because, you know, all I ever wanted was good things for this guy.
Now… he's wanted for possibly killing someone.
It blew my mind. "What do you mean there's a manhunt for Kai?
"What's going on with Kai?"
And it's all, "He killed a 70-something-odd-year-old man."
It's like, "No."
Three months ago, I'm searching for this guy
to put him on television so we can all enjoy him.
Three months later, the police are looking for this guy
so he can be judged for killing a human being.
[Jessob] Two days later, I still hadn't heard from him.
And then on Tuesday, May 14th, 2013,
Kai posted this on Facebook.
"What would you do if you woke up with a groggy head,
metallic taste in your mouth, in a stranger's house…
walked to the mirror
and seen come dripping from the side of your face
from your mouth, and started retching,
realizing that someone had drugged, raped, and blown their fucking load in you?"
[Alex] And he had this ominous question at the end. "What would you do?"
I remember turning to my wife
and being like, "This guy just killed someone."
What I know of Kai, I know that he has that switch,
and he has that deep, deep, deep-seated anger and hatred for assault.
But, I mean, I just don't believe…
I don't think he would do something like that for no reason.
The manhunt needed to find him as quickly as possible
to make sure that nobody else got hurt along the way.
The investigation revealed there were communications
with a young woman that was a fan of his that the task force called Fan Number One.
And this was somebody who Caleb had met, uh, through Facebook,
had communicated with,
uh, somebody who had expressed interest in hanging out with him.
They had made plans to get together. It was Mother's Day.
Caleb did not follow through on those plans,
and they didn't connect when they were originally supposed to.
We then know that, uh, she did not hear from him
until about nine o'clock that night.
[line ringing]
[John] And he repeatedly started calling and texting her over and over again,
asking to be picked up,
asking for, uh, transport out of the Clark area.
[line ringing]
[robotic voice] Your call's been forwarded to an automatic voice message system.
Hey, Kim, this is Kai.
Um, my place fell through.
I was wondering, would you still be able to ride up here?
Um, it'd be really awesome if you could.
But, yeah, if you could text me back here.
- My phone keeps dying. - [static]
[John] Sunday night into Monday, Caleb was able to make it down from Rahway
to go to Asbury Park.
He met up with Fan Number One.
They took some photos together,
and she had told investigators that she was surprised
because his appearance was different
from what she knew of his video appearances
as well as his Facebook pictures.
He had apparently cut his hair,
which later on helped in the investigation.
But now we had a recent picture.
It showed his short hair.
It showed his face tattoo in pretty great detail,
and that picture went out around the world.
[reporter] An employee inside a Starbucks recognized him
and quickly called 911.
[officer] Police arrived. He was not there.
Officers began to look in the immediate area.
One officer took a chance and went to the Greyhound bus station,
saw him in the waiting area, called for backup,
and, uh, made an arrest.
[woman] Can you just tell us what happened?
[woman 2] Can you tell us what happened?
I've been advised by an attorney not to say anything to you guys.
I'd like to say thank you to all the supporters.
[Jessob] He looked different, for sure.
His hair was short. He had that face tattoo.
I had seen pictures of the face tattoo before from, like, social media, but…
And maybe it's because of, you know, the surrounding situation.
Now he's in police custody and, you know, wanted for murder,
so the perception of him also is changing.
He's not the hero anymore. He's the villain.
In February, Kai the Hatchet-Wielding Hitchhiker
risked his life to save the lives of innocent people in West Fresno.
Today, he's been arrested for allegedly taking the life
of a man in New Jersey.
There's so much sadness,
having to report that, you know, this guy that was once a hero
and, you know, grew to be a friend
is now in custody for murder and another gentleman's dead.
[interrogator] Tell us everything you want to tell us from the beginning of it.
He met me up in Times Square.
He's like, "Oh, you look lost. Where you heading to?"
I says, "Jersey."
He says, "Oh, I'm… I'm headed there."
"You want to go get a bite to eat?" and stuff.
At first, I thought he was really nice, and then he fuckin' raped me.
[interrogator] What did you guys eat?
Uh, he got some, um, Parmigiano stuff from an Italian restaurant nearby.
[interrogator] And then what'd you guys do?
[Kai] Then we was drinking beer,
and he wanted to put the beer into a glass instead of a bottle,
and, uh, we watched some TV.
Then I felt sleepy so I went to bed.
I woke up the next morning,
and there's a metallic taste in my mouth.
I looked in the mirror, and there's come coming down the side of my face.
- [interrogator] Did you confront him? - [Kai] No, I didn't.
[interrogator] Okay. You wake up, he tells you it's tme to wake up?
He drove me over to New Jersey Transit and got me a ticket over to Asbury.
Okay. And what'd you say to him?
I said goodbye and he says, you know,
"Call me at this number or email me
if you ever need a place to stay for a night or something."
[interrogator] Then he buys you a train ticket?
[Kai] Yeah.
I went to Asbury to wait for a friend who said they're gonna meet me
at, like, one or two, and five o'clock rolled around,
they still weren't around, so I called him back.
[interrogator] So your friends don't show up?
[Kai] No, and I got, uh…
I got raped. Like, you're saying you're charging me with first degree murder?
[interrogator] Right.
So when your friends don't show up, what did you do?
I went back up to see if he'd be able to put me up for the night.
And what did you guys do?
Um, he brought me back over to his place
and said that, uh, he didn't wanna order out that night,
so he gave me some burgers
and, uh, drank a few beers. That's all I remember.
After that, I was waking up on the floor and him trying to pull down my pants.
[interrogator] Okay. So you wake up on the floor with your pants down?
- Yeah, he's pulling down my pants. - [interrogator] Okay.
And how was he dressed?
Uh, he was… he was in his underwear.
[interrogator] Okay.
What happens next?
[Kai] I just hit him.
He was trying to manhandle me.
- [interrogator] Okay. - He threw me around, and I was like…
What did you hit him with?
I just… I just hit him.
[interrogator] With your hands?
[Kai] Yeah, I don't even remember. I could've elbowed him.
Kneed him, I don't know.
[interrogator] Okay. So how did you finally get him off you?
Well, I… I fucking hit him in the head.
Can I get a drink of water?
- [interrogator] There's a cup right there. - No, this is Alex.
Thank you, sir.
Ah.
I should probably be talking to a lawyer, shouldn't I?
[interrogator] I can't give you legal advice. It's up to you.
- I wanna talk to a lawyer. - [interrogator] Okay, fair enough.
Um, the time is approximately 9:50 p.m.
Um, Mr. Lawrence has decided to speak to an attorney.
Once I walk out of this room,
I won't be able to talk to you again. Do you have any questions for us?
What's the penalty of this crime in New Jersey?
That's not up to us to decide.
[interrogator] That's up to the judge to decide.
Is the…
is the death penalty legal here in New Jersey?
Um okay, we're done, okay? You asked for an attorney,
so we're gonna have to stop talking, okay?
All right?
- [interrogator] Good luck. - Thanks.
[door closes and locks]
[sighs]
[Rob] Kai was trying to claim self-defense.
But that's not what the crime scene told us.
The crime scene told us that this person was just beaten to death.
He's a 74-year-old male.
It didn't look like Kai was putting up a fight
because there's gonna be defensive wounds.
You're gonna be blocking punches,
so there's gonna be bruising, scuffing, scraping.
Nowhere did anybody say
they saw Kai with scratches, cuts, bruises… anything.
I know that there are situations where people are drugged
and are being raped, are being whatever,
and they wake up from that and they fight for their lives.
What does fighting for your life look like?
Information started, you know, trickling out.
The autopsy report, it was brutal.
So it made the self-defense in Kai's story
look a lot more questionable.
[Rob] Based on the testimony of the medical examiner,
he said it looked like he was stomped.
His eye orbitals were broken.
These are probably the strongest bones in your body next to your femur.
His nose was broken. Above his nose was broken.
His ear was almost off,
and it had a scuff mark on the ear like that bloodstain in the hallway,
where you could see some sort of material in the bloodstain,
and it sorta looked like that on his ear.
You don't get that from punching somebody.
You get that from literally stomping down on their head.
At this point, it's not a whodunit. You always wanna know why.
He said he was sexually assaulted Saturday night.
Sunday morning, we have him leaving and embracing his sexual assaulter,
and then he contacts the person who sexually assaulted him
later on that same day
and comes back to Clark.
Two and a half weeks before Kai met Mr. Galfy,
he posted something disturbing on Facebook.
Kai wrote, "A HuffPost article titled,
'Is Vigilante Pedophile Hunting A Good Idea?'"
"You decide! For you!"
"I'll decide for me."
[Dean] When arrested, he had printouts
of sexual predators, known, convicted predators.
Did he perceive Joe Galfy as a predator
and thought he was providing some type of vigilante justice?
That I don't know.
It doesn't make sense that Joe, who's so mild-mannered
and wants to help, would attack somebody.
But drugged and raped him? Doesn't sound like Joe, does it?
Doesn't sound like Joe
and also Joe physically
is not Arnold Schwarzenegger at 70.
Um, he's just not. Um, you know, as much as I liked Joe,
uh, I would not, you know, rely upon him in a, uh, fistfight.
[Ted] There's a moment in time when somebody murders someone
that there's that fear on the victim's part
that, "I'm gonna die."
Every time we talked about this in our office,
we would say that we were always the voice of the victim.
That's what the prosecutor's office is all about.
And there was a moment in time, no matter what Mr. Galfy was doing,
he would have had that fear.
[Bob] I could see a situation where Kai's put into a rage,
not only hit once but keep on pounding away,
and pounding away as Joe tries to escape down the hallway
and just bleeds his way to die.
I'm angry.
It's a murder, clear and simple,
and Joe was too good a guy
to have been killed, uh, for almost nothing.
And nobody knows. Nobody knows why.
With this guy's past, I mean, I don't think it's a surprise
that he would snap and do something like that.
I don't think it was self-defense.
I really believe that this guy is innocent.
[man] He goes from hero to wanted man in three months. How should I feel here?
[man 2] I want Kai to be free and just going on--
- [man 3] You like the viralness of him. - [man 2] Yeah!
[man 3] Is this a guardian angel? Or a stone-cold killer?
[woman] Let us know in the comments.
There is a difference between the court of public opinion
and an actual superior court.
And a jury in an actual superior court
listen to the facts of the case that the prosecutor's office put forward,
they listen to the facts of the case what Caleb's side had to say,
uh, and ultimately decided
that the prosecutor's office had done their job well.
[Jessob] The trial was several days,
and the jury and everyone saw a different side of Kai than I saw,
and at the end of the trial, the judge had some pretty poignant and powerful words.
Judge Robert Kirsch called Kai
"a powder keg of explosive rage."
"You created this public image of a free spirit,
but underneath that free spirit, the jury saw another side of you."
"A cold-blooded, calculated, callous killer."
[Kai] The jury didn't believe me
because people are used to when a rape survivor isn't believed,
the rapist is presumed innocent.
But this was never a rape trial. The rapist is dead.
This was a homicide trial. Self-defense against rape is a right.
But they told the jury the burden was on me
to prove intoxication and rape by clear and convincing evidence.
But I deserve the same presumption of innocence,
unless proven guilty beyond a reasonable doubt,
that's given to the seven of eight rapists that beat their charges and walk free.
I met Kai in this heroic… situation,
and this judge, I get it,
you know, he only saw the bad side of Kai
and, you know, was put through this whole trial,
which was brutal 'cause of the crime scene and stuff like that, so, um…
The "cold-blooded" part and the "for no reason," I just…
Man, I don't know.
I don't know.
Why did nobody see that he was dangerous?
I think people did.
I think… I think there was people
who, you know, rightfully thought he was dangerous.
I mean, not… not on my end, you know…
And it wasn't 'cause I wanted to get this guy on TV so bad
that I believed him, that I was putting down some fear of him,
or I was discounting other people's fear because this helped me in some way.
It was because I didn't see it. It was because I didn't believe it, you know.
I wasn't trying to minimize anybody else's fears
because it benefited me. I just…
I just… I saw what I thought I saw,
and I wanted to help the person I thought I saw.
And, you know, I was wrong.
[Bob] I think the media had something to blame for the creation of Kai.
I've yet to see any analysis
of anyone in the media saying, "Boy, did we make a mistake?"
"Did we create this celebrity and monster without doing our homework?"
I think what Bob's saying is if you're going to glorify someone,
you better know who you're glorifying.
I can sit here and say I did everything the right way and tried to…
tried to do everything for him and have him be successful and happy
and… I don't know, expose the good in him and hide the bad,
and I just couldn't, I guess.
No one could, I guess.
[Shirley] In our communication, I've told him before,
if ever he wants me to visit him, I will.
Right now he's said no.
I don't know if I ever will see him again.
[Brad] There's no more home-free. There's no more Dogtown.
There's no more anything, ever.
Your address is gonna be your address forever,
and this is a guy who never wanted an address.
[exhales]
Good God.
[ominous music playing]