HONOLULU — Former Hawaii lawmaker Suzanne Chun Oakland remembers arriving in school one morning in 1977 to an eerie buzz.
The 15-year-old had met up with girlfriends as standard earlier than class at Honolulu’s McKinley Excessive College when she discovered a pupil named Daybreak Momohara had been discovered lifeless on the second ground of a college constructing.
“I don’t understand how we obtained phrase of it, however all the things unfold actually rapidly,” Chun Oakland mentioned.
Chun Oakland did not know Momohara, who was 16, however the unsolved loss of life has haunted her and different McKinley college students and employees for practically 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 dwelling.
The suspect, former McKinley pupil Gideon Castro, was scheduled to make an preliminary courtroom look Friday earlier than a choose in Salt Lake County District Courtroom. He remained in custody Thursday with the bond for his launch set at $250,000, in accordance with Salt Lake County Sheriff’s Workplace data.
Castro’s legal professional, Marlene Mohn, didn’t reply to e mail and telephone messages looking for remark.
Momohara had been sexually assaulted and strangled, police mentioned.
“I used to be simply actually unhappy,” Chun Oakland recalled earlier this week. “I believe for our pupil physique, after all there’s that concern that what if he’s nonetheless on the market and he does it to anyone else.”
On March 21, 1977, shortly after 7:30 a.m., Honolulu police discovered Momohara mendacity on her again, partially clothed, an orange fabric wrapped tightly round her neck.
Particulars from greater than 4 a long time in the past are fuzzy for 1967 McKinley graduate Grant Okamura, who was the college’s 28-year-old band instructor in 1977, however the morning Momohara was discovered has remained a core reminiscence.
Momohara’s sister — certainly one of his flute gamers — arrived in school that day not realizing her sister had been discovered lifeless, he recalled. The sister was known as to the workplace and later walked into the band room, devastated.
“The opposite college students had been making an attempt to console her,” Okamura mentioned. “At that time, I could not have band. How do you will have a category? She simply sat there crying.”
She did not return to high school for weeks afterward.
He does not bear in mind the sister’s title. The Related Press was unable to make contact with any doable kinfolk. Okamura mentioned he met Momohara just a few 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 instructed her mom she was going to a close-by purchasing middle with pals. That was the final time her mom noticed her, murder Lt. Deena Thoemmes mentioned.
Police launched sketches of an individual of curiosity and a doable car described by witnesses as a 1974 or 1975 Pontiac Lemans. A witness reported seeing the automobile when he and his girlfriend drove via campus the night time earlier than Momohara died. The witness noticed a person and the automobile on the grass close to the college’s English constructing, Thoemmes mentioned.
The witness circled again round however the automobile 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 objects of proof from the scene, together with Momohara’s underwear. They had been in a position to develop a DNA profile in 2020. Then, in 2023, police acquired details about potential suspects, two brothers who had been interviewed in 1977.
A number of days after Momohara was killed, detectives interviewed Castro, who graduated from McKinley Excessive in 1976. He mentioned he met Momohara at a college dance that 12 months 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 residing. They “surreptitiously” obtained DNA from one of many brother’s grownup kids, 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 dwelling the place he lived in Millcreek, simply south of Salt Lake Metropolis, on suspicion of second-degree homicide.
Neither Okamura nor Chun Oakland remembered Castro.
Chun Oakland graduated in 1979 and grew as much as turn out to be a Democratic member of the Hawaii Senate. She mentioned Momohara’s killing bothered her through the years, particularly when she would meet victims via her work as a lawmaker or as a board member of the nonprofit Intercourse Abuse Therapy Heart, a statewide program provding companies for sexual assault survivors.
Chun Oakland mentioned she is grateful an arrest was doable even in spite of everything these years.
“I believe the neighborhood normally, and our elected officers, they know the significance of making an attempt to protect the proof that may sometime be capable to see justice for that particular person or people,” she mentioned.
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Hannah Schoenbaum in Salt Lake Metropolis contributed to this report.