Grim reminiscences resurface after Hawaii 1977 chilly case arrest | EUROtoday

Grim reminiscences resurface after Hawaii 1977 chilly case arrest
 | EUROtoday

Former Hawaii lawmaker Suzanne Chun Oakland remembers arriving at college one morning in 1977 to an eerie buzz.

The 15-year-old had met up with girlfriends as ordinary earlier than class at Honolulu’s McKinley High School when she discovered a scholar named Dawn Momohara had been discovered lifeless on the second ground of a faculty constructing.

“I don’t know how we got word of it, but everything spread really quickly,” Chun Oakland mentioned.

Chun Oakland didn’t know Momohara, who was 16, however the unsolved loss of life has haunted her and different McKinley college students and workers for almost half a century. That was till final week, when police used advances in DNA expertise to arrest a 66-year-old resident of a Utah nursing residence.

The suspect, former McKinley scholar Gideon Castro, was scheduled to make an preliminary courtroom look Friday earlier than a choose in Salt Lake County District Court. He remained in custody Thursday with the bond for his launch set at $250,000, in line with Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Office information.

Castro’s lawyer, Marlene Mohn, didn’t reply to e mail and cellphone messages looking for remark.

Momohara had been sexually assaulted and strangled, police mentioned.

“I was just really sad,” Chun Oakland recalled earlier this week. “I think for our student body, of course there’s that concern that what if he’s still out there and he does it to somebody else.”

On March 21, 1977, shortly after 7:30 a.m., Honolulu police discovered Momohara mendacity on her again, partially clothed, an orange material wrapped tightly round her neck.

Details from greater than 4 a long time in the past are fuzzy for 1967 McKinley graduate Grant Okamura, who was the varsity’s 28-year-old band instructor in 1977, however the morning Momohara was discovered has remained a core reminiscence.

Momohara’s sister — considered one of his flute gamers — arrived at college that day not realizing her sister had been discovered lifeless, he recalled. The sister was referred to as to the workplace and later walked into the band room, devastated.

“The other students were trying to console her,” Okamura mentioned. “At that point, I couldn’t have band. How do you have a class? She just sat there crying.”

She didn’t return to highschool for weeks afterward.

He doesn’t bear in mind the sister’s identify. The Associated Press was unable to make contact with any potential relations. Okamura mentioned he met Momohara a couple of occasions when he let her into the air-conditioned band room to attend for her sister.

The morning earlier than Momohara was killed, she obtained a name from an unknown male and advised her mom she was going to a close-by buying middle with associates. That was the final time her mom noticed her, murder Lt. Deena Thoemmes mentioned.

Police launched sketches of an individual of curiosity and a potential car described by witnesses as a 1974 or 1975 Pontiac Lemans. A witness reported seeing the automotive when he and his girlfriend drove by campus the night time earlier than Momohara died. The witness noticed a person and the automotive on the grass close to the varsity’s English constructing, Thoemmes mentioned.

The witness circled again round however the automotive and the person had been gone.

Police had been unable to establish a suspect and the case grew chilly, although grief lingered over the campus.

In 2019, chilly case detectives requested a forensic biology unit to look at a number of gadgets of proof from the scene, together with Momohara’s underwear. They had been capable of develop a DNA profile in 2020. Then, in 2023, police obtained details about potential suspects, two brothers who had been interviewed in 1977.

Several days after Momohara was killed, detectives interviewed Castro, who graduated from McKinley High in 1976. He mentioned he met Momohara at a faculty dance that yr and final noticed her at a carnival on campus in February 1977. Police interviewed his brother, who additionally met Momohara on the dance.

In November 2023, Honolulu police went to Chicago, the place the brother was dwelling. They “surreptitiously” obtained DNA from one of many brother’s grownup youngsters, Thoemmes mentioned.

Lab findings excluded the brother as a suspect, however a DNA pattern from Castro’s grownup son, and later from Castro himself, proved he was accountable, Thoemmes mentioned.

He was arrested final week on the nursing residence the place he lived in Millcreek, simply south of Salt Lake City, on suspicion of second-degree homicide.

Neither Okamura nor Chun Oakland remembered Castro.

Chun Oakland graduated in 1979 and grew as much as turn into a Democratic member of the Hawaii Senate. She mentioned Momohara’s killing bothered her through the years, particularly when she would meet victims by her work as a lawmaker or as a board member of the nonprofit Sex Abuse Treatment Center, a statewide program provding providers for sexual assault survivors.

Chun Oakland mentioned she is grateful an arrest was potential even in any case these years.

“I think the community in general, and our elected officials, they know the importance of trying to preserve the evidence that can someday be able to see justice for that individual or individuals,” she mentioned.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/crime/dawn-momohara-hawaii-arrest-police-b2689690.html