The Honolulu Advertiser from Honolulu, Hawaii • 53

The Honolulu Advertiser I A TTTT I OiP JOAWA1J Wednesday, October 30, 1996 City Desk: 525-8090 (initio DAN NAKASO fe In)I7ft ED p(aI5J Halloween nightmare: Body in box lud Bui firm Mollway means she must be reappointed and go through the process all over again if she is to become Hawaii's fourth full-time federal district judge. criminal defendants. A fourth judge would enable the courts to "operate more efficiently in the best interest of justice," he said. Jennifer Goto, Inouye's spokeswoman, said the senator will again push Mollway's nomination, but it's not clear when the Senate might confirm her. The Senate reconvenes Jan.

7. Goto said Mollway's nomination was derailed by Republican conservative senators, including Lauch Faircloth of North Carolina, who raised questions about Mollway's affiliation with the American Civil Liberties Union. Mollway was one of 18 mem Appointment of Mollway stalled in U.S. Senate By Ken Kobayashi Advertiser Courts Writer The U.S. Senate's failure this month to confirm Susan Oki Mollway's appointment as a federal judge means the court vacancy here will last another three months or more.

Mollway, 45, a civil litigation lawyer, was nominated by Pres ident Clinton in December to fill the vacancy created by the death of U.S. District Judge Harold Fong in April last year. Her nomination cleared the Senate Judiciary Committee but was among three dozen Clinton appointments to ambassadorships and judgeships that weren't confirmed by the Republican-controlled Senate before it adjourned Oct 4. Mollway's was one of four names submitted to the White House by Daniel Inouye, Hawaii's senior Democratic senator, for the lifetime appointment The Senate's failure to con- bers of the ACLU Hawaii board of directors until her resignation in September. She is a partner in the Honolulu law firm of Cades Schutte Fleming and Wright and is married to Dan Mollway, executive director of the state Ethics Commission.

Mollway declined to talk about the nomination, except to say: "I would consider it a very great honor for my name to be submitted again." What happens if Clinton is ousted and Republican Bob See Judge Page B4 Mollway: Must start over again. Chief U.S. District Judge Alan Kay said Hawaii's federal judges will do their best to keep up with the growing caseload and meet mandates for speedy trials for Free vaccinations, ffee 13 Big Island to vote on quit-to-run provision By Hugh Clark Advertiser Big Island Bureau HILO, Hawaii When former Mayor Herbert Matayoshi and ex-Council members Lorraine Inouye and Steve Ya-mashiro were forced to resign while seeking another office, they did so without complaining publicly. This year, Council Chairwoman Keiko Bonk, a Green Party member, was forced to resign to run for mayor and she complained, saying the rule is unfair to candidates whose terms are up that year anyway. On Tuesday, voters will decide if they want to remove the provision created when the county's charter was adopted in 1968.

It is one of two Hawaii County issues voters will act on this election. Advocates say elimination of the resign-to-run rule will allow elected officials to serve out their terms if the terms expire that year. Office-holders whose terms do not expire that year would still have to resign to run for another office. The other question on the ballot calls for restricting Council members to four successive two-year terms. The change comes on the heels of earlier charter amendments that created two-year, instead of four-year terms.

KAILUA He was good with his hands and was always bringing discarded bicycles, toys and machinery back to life. But even he could do nothing for the corpse he found in the tool box. It was Halloween, 1994. The discovery of the body later identified by Honolulu authorities as Barry Pescos-ta, a 53-year-old tile contractor was big news in our quiet corner of Kailua. Our next-door neighbor on the left found Pescosta's body near a construction site in Olomana.

The site happened to be the future dream house for our next-door neighbors on the right. The neighbor who found the box, a laborer by trade, was a sensitive, God-fearing Christian with a gift for music and magic hands that gave peo- pie's cast-offs a second chance. He was rehabilitating an old mini-pickup truck and only needed one of those long, truck-bed tool boxes and he'd be in business. He was leaving our neighbors' property off Old Kalani-anaole Highway when he saw the abandoned tool box. It was perfect.

Except, of course, for the body inside that had been there for 18 months ever since Ross Alan Horton beat his business partner to death in Waikiki and stuffed the 6-foot body into a 4-foot-long coffin. Horton was convicted of murder in June and received a life sentence. I guess there's never really an appropriate season for such a thing. But Halloween, it turns out, is a particularly bad time for a sensitive person to find a cadaver: An inflatable skeleton hung from our rain gutter. Homemade ghosts were everywhere.

Cut-out black cats and grim-faced jack-o'-lanterns kept watch over front doorsteps. I don't know whether our neighbor ever told his children about finding Pescosta's body. With his five kids, our two and the other next-door neighbors' three, it was impossible to make any sense of the calamity that passed for childhood conversation at our house. I do know he told his wife because she asked us, politely, if we could take down our life-sized skeleton. Her husband had been flashing back to the smells and sight of the decomposing body every time he drove by our house.

And it was starting to get to him. Not long after Halloween of 1994, the tradesman and his family moved to the Mainland for better job opportunities. The other neighbors moved out and into their dream house and began worrying more about drainage than the Idea that a killer had once walked nearby. They'll bring their three children back to our street tomorrow and we'll all go trick-or-treating together. And the blow-up skeleton Is back as well, swinging in the wind.

Guest columnist Dan Nakaso is an Advertiser staff writer. Bob Krauss is on vacation; his column will resume in late November. Deborah BookerThe Honolulu Advertiser Nuuanu Elementary student Iwalani Yamaguchi, left, becomes one of the first fifth-graders in Hawaii to receive a free hepatitis vaccination. Giving the shot is registered nurse Rosalie Schreiber. Yesterday was the start of the nation's first statewide immunization campaign against hepatitis an infectious viral disease that can cause inflammation and injury to the liver.

The state Health Department plans to immunize all Hawaii fifth-graders during this school year. Honolulu charter ballot could change old system Big Island mayor candidates far apart in remaining funds LECTION sion, similar to the Police ConK mission, that would have the power to appoint and remove the $58,146 in debt and is keeping her advertising bills paid with loans from herself and others: her parents, who have put up about 1 boyfriend i By Angela Miller Advertiser Capitol Bureau The City Council has proposed eight amendments to the City Charter that most Council members say will remove politics from some city appointments, remove nepotism from city offices and remove a city agency that is an unnecessary level of bureaucracy. Half of the proposals are housekeeping measures such as changing the name of a department and extending city ethics laws to cover the prosecutor but four of them could significantly change some city practices. Question 1 on the ballot asks voters to approve a Fire Commis- from a longtime backer whose wife has family ties in Kona. Other than the loans, most of Bonk's funding has been from contributors who gave under $100 except for $1,000 from Paul Hewett of Hilo and $740 from the United Public Workers union in Honolulu.

Yamashiro reports a lot of contributors from $100 to $500 but only two of $1,000 the Hawaii Association of Realtors and the Historic Kress Building, both headquartered on Oahu. Rath got $2,000 from the Republican Party's national campaign committee and has received only two contributions of $500 or more. By Hugh Clark Advertiser Big Island Bureau HILO, Hawaii Green Party mayoral candidate Keiko Bonk has borrowed more than $62,000 to keep her campaign going, while incumbent Steve Yamashiro is riding with a $66,512 surplus. The five-way mayoral campaign is not the most expensive in Big Island history. The record is the total of $1.12 million spent in 1992.

Yamashiro had spent $406,544, Bonk $86,181 and Republican Jim Rath $28,154 as of last Friday's campaign spending report. Bonk reported that she is Bonk: Had to borrow $62,000, fire chief. Councilman John Henry Felix, who introduced the amendment, said it is needed to remove politics from the selection of the fire chief. "It had become a political football," he said. "Every time there was a change in administration the person who supported the new mayor became chief.

You don't always get the best selection that way." Mayor Jeremy Harris said he See Ballot Page B5 Mike Christopher, Rafael Chaikin of Ketchikan, Alaska, and former county clerk Barbara Bell, $5,000. Bill Bonk, who is managing the campaign for his daughter, said the Alaska funds came READER SPECIAL: SCHOOL KEKOHIES ISLAND VOICES Teacher's fascination with Hawaii remembered decades later By Richard Sullivan in In 1954, ML Washington Ele mentary was Los Angeles' smallest school: five classrooms with 1 V2 grades each, and one room for kindergarten. The "top of the fifth" and the entire sixth Richard Sullivan is the sixth-grader next to the class sign. Miss Coleman is the older teacher at right Photo courtesy of Richard Sullivan "It turned out i that the mall development I made a better cemetery" Cemetery historian Nanette Napoleon Pumell, about the small graveyard in Kaneohe that Windward Mall built its parking lot around. See story.

Pas B3. i grade were presided over by Miss Coleman, the best teacher Did she return to her beloved Hawaii? To this day I wonder what circumstances connected her to these Islands. She painted a vivid picture of Hawaii for my impressionable 11-year-old mind. It was an impression that has held true with only perceptions slightly altered by maturity when I experienced the real Hawaii on moving here four years ago, 38 years from ML Washington's "top of the fifth." Richard Sullivan, 54, of St. Louis Heights, is an architect with Architects Hawaii.

children polishing Tcvkui huts. She told us of boat days and throwing leis on the water to ensure one's return. She read us legends from books illustrated by Robert Lee Eskridge how a commoner boy broke the kapu by secretly riding the ali'i sledway. When our work was good, Miss Coleman stamped it with a dancing menehune. When it was really good, we got two.

I never learned the details of Miss Coleman's life in Hawaii. She retired the year after I completed sixth grade, and I never saw her again. I ever had. Miss Coleman talked inces 1 santly about Hawaii: the swaying palms; the gentle afternoon rains falling with such regularity, she claimed, that people kept time by them. 1.

She spoke of glorious singing, 2 1 of old Hawaiian royalty, of local.