Kurou Otoharada

Small, dark eyes sit beneath a short-cropped head of brown hair.

Otoharada is a violent, cornered man. He has already left several people dead or hurt before the standoff, and he readily uses a room of hostages, children among them, as a human shield.

Otoharada guns down and injures six victims, then holds eight schoolchildren and staff captive at a nursery, a siege that fills Japanese newscasts complete with his name and picture. Light, fresh in possession of the Death Note, looks for a deserving target to try it on and writes the criminal's name, then counts off the seconds. Forty pass with nothing, and he is ready to call the book a hoax when reports break that the hostages are walking free and officers are storming in; soon after, Otoharada is declared dead from a sudden heart attack. The proof that the notebook truly kills from afar sets Light on his crusade to cleanse the world, and as criminal after criminal drops from heart failure, the public christens the unseen executioner Kira. Working the pattern backward, L pins the very first such death on Otoharada, and since only Japanese outlets carried it, he concludes Kira operates from Japan, baiting the region with the Lind L. Tailor broadcast beamed solely into populous Kanto.

The 2015 drama recasts him as a meth-using killer whom Soichiro had jailed ten years earlier; out on parole and on the run, he murders a cab driver and then a policeman for his weapon before seizing a mother and her little girl in their home. Soichiro offers himself in the child's place, and as Otoharada moves to shoot, meaning to end them both, Light inscribes his name, making him the second person Light kills in that version. In Death Note: The Musical, he again walls himself in with eight captives, his broadcast standoff prompting Light's first trial of the notebook.