Ka Wai Ola - Office of Hawaiian Affairs, Volume 22, Number 7, 1 July 2005 — Skull sentence [ARTICLE]

Skull sentence

In May, a California man who tried to sell a 200-year-old Hawaiian skull on the Internet was sentenced to 600 hours of community service and ordered to pay more than $13,000 in fines. Jerry Hasson, of Huntington Beach, is also required See SKULL on page 6

)fl ■ SKULL from page 5 to publish an apology in several Hawai'i newspapers. He told the federal judge that he attempted to sell the skull to finance his treatments for cancer. Hasson acquired the skull as a teenager in Maui in 1969. He snuck into an archaeological excavation and found the entire skeleton, but took only the skull. In February 2004, he tried to auction off the skull on eBay as that of a Hawaiian warrior involved in one of Kamehameha's battles to unite the islands. He included a pieture of the skull and started the bid-

ding at $1,000, with an immediate purchase price of $12,500. In the listing on eBay, he called the skull "a souvenir of my youth." After he was contacted by Hawaiian cultural specialists informing him that the sale would be illegal, Hasson removed the skull from the online auction site. However, when an agent from the federal Bureau of Indian Affairs contacted him posing as a collector and offered to buy the skull, he agreed to sell it for $2,500. In January, Hassonpleaded guilty to violating the federal Archaeological Resources Protection Act for attempting to sell the skull online. TJ