Newswatch
Isle leaders urge state
to probe Bishop EstateThey want more accountability
from trusteesStarbulletin.com presents a special Saturday edition with complete coverage. The entire special section is at http://archives.starbulletin.com/specials/bishop/index.html.
Saturday Bishop Estate Special Section
Richard McKenzie heard the engine of a Buick before he saw the car that crashed into his 11-year-old daughter, critically injuring her yesterday. Father:
‘I thought she was dead’His daughter survived a car crash
By Linda Aragon, Star-Bulletin
downtown but is in intensive careAt first, he didn't recognize the body that flew into the air after being hit by the car, driven by a 51-year-old attorney, that ran onto the courtyard of the downtown Bank of Hawaii building, closing off downtown streets and tying up traffic for hours.
"I saw a body flying and I though it was a passenger from the car," Richard McKenzie said. "I was feeling really good that I could help out, that I was one of the first ones on the scene."
The Kailua resident said he ran to the body and saw the girl's face slumped down. She was unconscious and badly mangled.
"I didn't think there was anything I could do to help," he said. "So I ran over to the car to help the driver."
Only when he noticed his 10-year-old son, Rory, was so upset by the crash did McKenzie realize the injured girl was his daughter, Katie.
"I thought she was dead," McKenzie said. He screamed for help and screamed for an ambulance. "Frankly I didn't want to look at her she was so twisted. I was afraid to move her."
Jerry I. Wilson, the driver of the Buick, said he took prescribed blood pressure medication for a prostate problem before leaving his Windward home yesterday.
"I was feeling great until I got downtown," Wilson said. "Sometime after Vineyard, I started feeling sick to my stomach and queasy. I wondered if it was the medication I took. I drove another block and it just got worse and then I started sweating. The only thing I could think of was to pull over and stop my car.
"Somehow instead of stopping the brakes I just did the opposite. I couldn't believe it. I didn't think I hit any person."
He said he slumped over his steering wheel and felt the sensation of hitting something at the time of the 8:15 a.m. crash at King and Bishop streets. He was admitted to Kaiser-Moanalua Hospital overnight for observation.
"My No. 1 concern is for the poor little girl and her family," Wilson said. "We got the church praying for her."
Police said the incident began when the Buick struck a Jaguar from behind near the Pauahi Street crosswalk on Bishop Street, causing the Jaguar to hit a Volvo stopped in front it. The Volvo then lunged into a pickup truck stopped in front of it. The cars were in the left lane of Bishop Street waiting for a traffic light to change.
Police said after hitting the Jaguar, the Buick veered across four lanes of traffic to the right-hand lane and proceeded through the King Street intersection onto the busy sidewalk outside the Bank of Hawaii building.
Witnesses said people waiting to cross the street and waiting at the bus stop jumped out of the way as the Buick ran onto the sidewalk. The Buick ripped an electric crosswalk pole from the ground and carried it with the car until it hit a fountain outside the bank.
Katie McKenzie, 11, and her brother Rory, 10, had taken the bus into work with their dad that morning. While changing buses at Bishop Street, Katie was walking in front of her family across the courtyard to a bus stop facing King Street.
"She had almost made it past," said Rory, who was right behind his older sister.
Richard McKenzie thought his daughter had made it out of the car's path.
Since yesterday, McKenzie along with his wife, Carole, and Rory have been waiting in the Intensive Care Unit of Queen's Hospital.
Carole McKenzie, director of Women's and Newborn Services at Kapiolani Medical Center for Women and Children, rattles off the long list of injuries her daughter is fighting. She has a ruptured spleen, a fractured kidney, a hole in her heart, a skull fracture and two broken legs. The girl remains unconscious. Her recovery will take months, her mother said.
But the family is confident that the strong, healthy girl who paddled for Lanikai Canoe Club and turns 12 on Friday will make it.
The annual Perseid meteor shower, one of the year's best, is scheduled to peak Monday night and in the wee hours Tuesday. Yearly meteor shower
promises a treatAssuming the skies are clear, observers should be in for a treat as the meteors plunge from the heavens and burn up in Earth's atmosphere.
Most meteors are small, about the size of sand grains. Yet they travel so fast, many miles per second, that they ignite brilliantly from friction with the air. They usually disappear in a fraction of a second.
Wayne Itozuka, assistant manager at the Bishop Museum Planetarium, said this will be one of the best opportunities this year for watching meteor showers. He said that ideal viewing is away from city lights, at such locations as Sandy Beach and the Waianae and Windward coasts on Oahu.
If the sky is clear, the best viewing times in Hawaii will be after mid<P>night Monday to 5 a.m. Tuesday, he said.
The shower will appear to emanate from the direction of the constellation Perseus, hence the name. Early Tuesday, Perseus will lie in the northeastern sky.
The first event scheduled for the new Hawaii Convention Center will be a first of another sort as well, a combined convention and reunion of nisei veterans of World War II and their offspring. WWII nisei convention
will open new centerThe Americans of Japanese Ancestry this week booked the center for July 3-5 next year, the week that the $350 million center is scheduled to formally open for business.
The Hawaii Convention & Visitors Bureau, which makes some of the bookings for the center, said the group expects 2,800 to attend.
Alan Kubota, president of the Sons & Daughters of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team and one of the meeting's organizers, said many of the attendees will come from the mainland.
"The units had their own reunions and such," Kubota said. This year the AJA Council, made up of various organizations that represent Americans of Japanese ancestry who fought for their country, decided to do something different, he said.
That was to bring all the groups together at one time in one place. The central organizations involved are veterans associations for the 100th Infantry Battalion, the 442nd Regimental Combat Team, the Military Intelligence Service and the 1399th Engineers Construction Battalion.
There will be oral history interviews and displays of archives and World War II memorabilia, Kubota said.
The East-West Center, which has weathered rough economic seas in recent years, will soon need a new person at the helm. East-West Center president
declares intent to retireCenter President Kenji Sumida informed George Ariyoshi, chairman of the board of governors, yesterday that he wants to retire and asked the former Hawaii governor to begin the search for a successor.
"I feel that I have fulfilled my commitment to the center, and it is time to move on," Sumida said.
Sumida, 66, said in June 1995 he wasn't interested in the job of president but still agreed to serve as successor to Michel Oksenberg, who resigned on March 1, 1995, for a senior researcher position at Stanford University.
Over the last two years, Sumida has watched Congress slash the center's federal budget from $24.5 million in 1995 to $10 million today, with the center losing half of its 244-member staff in the downsizing.
For next year, a U.S. Senate committee last month approved a $22 million center budget while the House cut funding to zero. The bill with the center's budget now goes to the Senate, and then faces a joint House-Senate conference committee.
Despite an uncertain federal budget, Sumida told Ariyoshi there is an improved outlook for funding. He hopes his successor will be a recognized leader with extensive experience in the Asia-Pacific region.
Sumida, who joined the center in 1989 as vice president for administration and treasurer, said he will stay on as long as needed for the board to conduct a search for president.
Chief Petty Officer Bill Hyneman, a hospital corpsman, had never seen so much trauma. Navy unit built road
for Guam rescue"I've worked at lots of trauma in my life, but I've never seen anything like that," Hyneman said upon his return last night from deployment on Guam, where his battalion helped passengers in the crash of a Korean Air 747.
The 281 Navy Seabees were part of a battalion winding up a seven-
month deployment on Guam. They were flown in on a World Airways charter jet and spoke with reporters shortly after their 8:46 p.m. touchdown at Hickam Air Force Base. The aircraft made a two-hour refueling stop, then took off for the Seabees home base at Gulfport, Miss.
The Boeing 747 was carrying 254 passengers, including 13 Americans, from Seoul to Guam when it crashed Wednesday into the dense underbrush of a rocky hill. Investigators said 29 people survived and 225 died.
Hyneman, 39, of West Palm Beach, Fla., said rescuers who rappelled down a mountain to reach the crash site first checked the perimeter around the wreckage and found no bodies, then began to sift through the debris.
The only unit member who dealt with a survivor was a doctor, Lt. Andrea Prince, still on Guam, he said. She assisted a girl about age 7 or 8, he said.
"Actually, she looked fairly good,"
Hyneman recalled. "It was a miracle she survived, because where they pulled her out of was devastated."
Lt. Cmdr. David Jarrell, 37, of Shelby, Ohio, battalion executive officer, said: "We built the tent camp, the support facility. We put up the morgue tent. We put up a galley tent to feed the folks and provide water. We also put up the command post.
"We built a road. We built an access road right through that jungle terrain."
