Dakota Briley was getting ready to teach a surfing lesson near Kawailoa Beach, also known as Chun's Reef, last year when an 18-year-old driver struck him and pinned him between two vehicles. Now 21, Briley and his parents have filed a lawsuit against the City and County of Honolulu and the State of Hawaii, alleging that officials failed to provide a safe parking area near some of the island's busiest beaches and that the negligence contributed to the crash that nearly killed him.
The lawsuit, filed Wednesday in circuit court, names Briley's parents, Natasha Maunalani Briley and Shawn Briley, as plaintiffs alongside their son, according to Hawaii News Now. The driver who struck Briley is also named as a defendant. Under Hawaii court rules, the filing doesn't request a specific damages figure, but it states that Briley's medical and rehabilitation expenses already exceed $3.5 million.
Nearly Two Months in the ICU
Briley spent nearly two months in intensive care at The Queen's Medical Center after the crash, the outlet reports, and he is still undergoing treatment on the mainland. A separate account from Lomabeat details that he spent 58 days at Queen's, mostly in a coma, before transferring to Craig Hospital in Colorado for rehabilitation. There, he has awakened from the coma, undergone 11 surgeries, and can now hold conversations, the site notes, while continuing speech, physical and occupational therapy.
In a GoFundMe update last month, Briley wrote that he was medically stable and focused on recovery, rehabilitation, strength training and healing. The family's attorney, Mike Cruise, described Briley as an exceptional young man with a radiant spirit, and said he now faces a lifetime of needs as he continues to rebuild.
A Parking Problem the Family Says Was Only Half-Fixed
Cruise argues the crash traces back to a safety gap the state and city have long known about but never fully closed. He said officials have acknowledged that Kawailoa and nearby Laniakea Beach should be treated as a single problem area, yet only addressed one half of it: the state built new parking and crosswalks at Laniakea, Hawaii News Now reports, while similar measures were never extended to Kawailoa, where beachgoers continue to park along the shoulder of Kamehameha Highway.
Cruise said that using the highway shoulder for parking at popular beach parks is inherently dangerous, and that city and state officials have delayed action despite long acknowledging the unsafe situation. The Laniakea work he referenced is part of a broader Kamehameha Highway Drainage and Safety Improvements project that broke ground near the beach, according to KITV. The plan calls for realigning part of the highway inland to improve pedestrian safety, reduce congestion, address shoreline erosion and strengthen roadway reliability, with a permanent bypass road planned on the mountain side of the existing parking lot between Haleiwa and Waimea. The project is expected to wrap up in 2026, and the highway is not expected to shut down completely during construction, per the station.
A Longer Fight Over Who Controls the Shoulder
The tension between the city and state over North Shore parking predates Briley's crash. The Hawaii Department of Transportation has said restricting parking on the mauka side of Kamehameha Highway at Laniakea remains its position for the most immediate safety and congestion fix, even as barriers there were removed to allow for shoreline certification, according to the agency. Honolulu, for its part, has said it has no interest in a support park being built at Laniakea and has urged that concrete barriers be reinstalled, per KHON2, which also reported that HDOT identified three possible ways to put the barriers back, including one option that would require city involvement. Years earlier, in 2019, a state highways deputy director said the city could direct the state's actions because it owns the park lands designated for the mauka side, the outlet noted at the time.
That jurisdictional back-and-forth is now central to the Briley family's case, which argues the same patchwork approach left Kawailoa without the protections added at Laniakea. Briley's age has been reported inconsistently across coverage of the crash — Hawaii News Now describes him as 21, while an earlier report from KITV put him at 20 at the time of the crash — and the discrepancy remains unresolved in the public record. For now, Briley continues his rehabilitation on the mainland as the lawsuit moves through Hawaii's circuit court system.
