Prosecutors believe that the brutal beating of a young couple Monday afternoon in a busy Waikele Center parking lot likely was a result of road rage.

Gerald D. Paakaula, 45, is accused of punching the husband in the throat and punching the wife and slamming her to the ground after the couple's car hit Paakaula's car.

A preliminary hearing yesterday for Paakaula, who is charged with second-degree assault, was postponed until March 16 to give him time to hire an attorney. Paakaula was released from custody after posting $20,000 bail.

His son, a teenager, was arrested on suspicion of second-degree assault. His case was referred to Family Court.

The incident occurred in front of the Baskin Robbins ice cream shop at the Waikele Center late Monday afternoon.

According to a police affidavit filed in court, Andrew and Dawn Dussell's Dodge Durango collided with Paakaula's Chevrolet while attempting to pull into a parking stall next to it.

Paakaula's son, "extremely angry that his vehicle had been struck," stepped out of the Chevy and began yelling obscenities toward Andrew Dussell, who was the driver, calling him a "f------ haole" while kicking the driver side door, the document said.

When Andrew Dussell got out of the Dodge, he was punched in the throat by Paakaula, the affidavit said. Dussell fell to the ground gasping for air and then received kicks to his head and face from the teen, leading to his convulsing, the document said.

The Dussells' 3-year-old child was in the backseat of the Dodge and witnessed the incident.

Jim Fulton, a spokesman for the prosecutor's office, said the case doesn't involve a hate crime.

"From our perspective, this was more motivated by rage from the incident rather than specifically targeted toward the individuals' race," he said.

Fulton said, "Any racial or ethnic comment came after the fact of the actual incident."

Under Hawai'i law, a hate crime is defined as any criminal act in which the perpetrator intentionally selects a victim based on race, religion, disability, ethnicity, national origin, gender identity or expression, or sexual orientation.

If a second-degree assault was prosecuted as a hate crime, the felony maximum penalty of five years could be increased to 10 years, but it must be proven that the perpetrator intentionally selected the victim based on the listed categories.

Andrew Dussell, 26, is in the Army and served two tours of duty in Iraq. Dawn Dussell, 23, is a nursing student at Hawai'i Pacific University. The couple live in Downtown Honolulu.

Doctors said both victims sustained concussions as a result of the beatings. Andrew Dussell also sustained fractures to the lower part of an eye socket and the maxillary sinus portion of his face. Dawn Dussell sustained fractures to her interior maxillary bone, nose and wrist.

Paakaula and his wife declined comment yesterday.

Jonathan Okamura, an ethnic studies professor at the University of Hawai'i-Manoa, said the alleged remarks indicate that the beating may have occurred, or escalated, as a result of racial considerations.

"That kind of reference, to me, indicates that this would be considered a hate crime; maybe not by the definition in Hawai'i but in other states," he said. "Why did he focus on the fact that (the man) was haole? That wasn't the issue. The issue was the damage to his car, not the race or ethnicity of the person who hit it."

The impact of a hate crime goes beyond the victims, Okamura said. Hate crimes, he said, "intimidate other people who belong to the same group" as a victim. "It instills fear in this larger category of people."

He added: "I imagine haoles throughout Hawai'i, if they heard about the incident, are very concerned about the possibility of that happening to them."

But Jonathan Osorio, chairman of the UH Kamakakuokalani Center for Hawaiian Studies, said that based on what he was told, he does not believe a hate crime was committed.

"It doesn't matter if their ethnicities are different. It doesn't matter that we're dealing with Hawaiians and haoles here," Osorio said.

He said he is troubled by suggestions that the incident may have been a hate crime.

"It worries me when people start calling something like this a hate crime because it starts to ramp up the public temperature over race in Hawai'i, and I don't think we need that," he said.

He said the incident occurred because of a fender bender. "Leave the rest of us out of it," Osorio said.

Friends of the Dussells are setting up a fund to assist the family.