The wife of a man indicted for trying to kill her on a Hawaii hiking trail said in her restraining-order petition that his suspicion she was having an affair “led to extreme jealously on his part” that culminated in an attempt to throw her off a cliff.
Anesthesiologist Gerhardt Konig, a former assistant professor of anesthesiology and bioengineering at the University of Pittsburgh, was being held on $5 million bail, charged with second-degree attempted murder. He was scheduled for a preliminary hearing on Monday, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette reported. A judge on Friday ordered Konig to stay away from his wife and their children.
The alleged attack happened last Monday during a getaway the 46-year-old Konig and his wife, Arielle, 36, took to celebrate her birthday. They had left their two children, ages 2 and 4, in Maui with family and a nanny so they could jaunt to Oahu, People reported. As the couple hiked Honolulu’s Pali Puka Trail, a short drive from the city’s downtown, Konig requested a selfie with his wife at the cliff’s edge. Arielle Konig later told police she refused, uneasy with their proximity to the drop, and started walking away.
When she did not accede to his demands that she come back, he pushed her into some bushes and they struggled, she testified. She got away, but then Konig started smashing her head with a rock, grabbing the back of her hair and smashing her face into the ground, she said. He also produced two syringes and attempted to inject her, but she wrested them away.
“I do not know what was in the syringe, but Gerhardt is an anesthesiologist and has access to several potentially lethal medications as part of his employment,” she wrote in the court filing, obtained by the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Her screams alerted two nearby hikers, one of whom confronted Konig and the other who called 911 as Konig fled. He was picked up later that day “after a brief foot pursuit,” police said in a statement. Arielle Konig was taken to Queens Medical Center in serious but stable condition, according to the affidavit obtained by People.
Arielle, a nuclear engineer, had spent more than a decade at Westinghouse in Pittsburgh, the Post-Gazette noted. She and her husband, who married in 2018, had moved to Hawaii about two years earlier. He worked as an anesthesiologist at Maui Health, a network of hospitals and clinics affiliated with Kaiser Permanente, but has since been suspended.