Do you know who murdered Dawn? Dawn Momohara, an Asian / Pacific Islander 16-year-old girl from Honolulu, was last heard from on Sunday, March 20, 1977, after what investigators later described as a phone call from an unknown male. Not long afterward, she told her mother she was going to meet friends at a nearby shopping center—an ordinary plan that quietly turned into a long night of waiting when she never came home.

By the next morning, March 21, 1977, the normal rhythm of classes at McKinley High School was broken by a discovery on campus. On the second floor of a school building, Dawn’s body was found near the hallway; investigators said she had been sexually assaulted and strangled, and reports described an orange cloth pulled tight around her neck. A medical examiner later determined she died of asphyxia due to strangulation and ruled the death a homicide. 
In the days that followed, detectives chased what fragments they could: witness accounts, a face seen briefly, a car out of place at the wrong hour. Police released sketches of a person of interest and a possible vehicle described by witnesses as a 1974 or 1975 Pontiac LeMans, noted for details like louvered rear windows and a two-tone look. One witness later reported seeing a man and the car near the school building the night before Dawn was found, yet the trail thinned as quickly as it formed, and the case slipped into years of unanswered questions. 
Decades later, the investigation was revived by what earlier detectives could not have used: modern DNA work on evidence preserved from the scene. Honolulu investigators reexamined items using newer forensic methods and developed a male DNA profile, then pursued leads that brought them back to people who had been interviewed early on—two brothers connected to the school. As the renewed inquiry widened, detectives compared family DNA and, through additional testing and analysis, focused on one brother while excluding the other, ultimately seeking a direct DNA sample to confirm what the genetic trail suggested. 
That work culminated in an arrest in January 2025, when authorities took Gideon Castro into custody at a Utah nursing home and accused him of second-degree murder in connection with Dawn’s killing. He appeared remotely from a hospital bed during Utah court proceedings and later agreed to be extradited to Hawaii, with his attorney indicating he intended to fight the charge there. But the legal path soon hit a serious delay: Honolulu prosecutors told Utah officials they were not ready to proceed, citing complications involving a key witness and the state of the evidence, and a Utah judge ordered Castro released from jail while Hawaii authorities said they still intended to pursue the case. 
