Former Hawaii lawmaker Suzanne Chun Oakland remembers arriving at school one morning in to an eerie buzz. The year-old had met up with girlfriends as usual before class at Honolulu's McKinley High School when she learned a student named Dawn Momohara had been found dead on the second floor of a school building. Chun Oakland didn't know Momohara, who was 16, but the unsolved death has haunted her and other McKinley students and staff for nearly half a century.
That was until last week, when police used advances in DNA technology to arrest a year-old resident of a Utah nursing home. On March 21, , shortly after a. She was partially clothed and lying on her back with an orange cloth tied around her neck, said Lt.
Deena Thoemmes, of Honolulu Police. A subsequent autopsy ruled Momohara was strangled to death, and the medical examiner said there were signs of sexual assault. Details from more than four decades ago are fuzzy for McKinley graduate Grant Okamura, who was the school's year-old band teacher in , but the morning Momohara was found has remained a core memory. Momohara's sister โ one of his flute players โ arrived at school that day not knowing her sister had been found dead, he recalled.
The sister was called to the office and later walked into the band room, devastated. How do you have a class? She just sat there crying. He doesn't remember the sister's name. The Associated Press was unable to make contact with any possible relatives. Okamura said he met Momohara a few times when he let her into the air-conditioned band room to wait for her sister.
The morning before Momohara was killed, she got a call from an unknown male and told her mother she was going to a nearby shopping center with friends. That was the last time her mother saw her, police said. Police released sketches of a person of interest and a possible vehicle described by witnesses as a or Pontiac Lemans.
