A Walk on the High Side Rescues 2 Boys

In a heroic nighttime rescue seven stories above Waikiki Beach, a Whittier man saved two boys from their mother’s ritual murder-suicide plans.

While one brother watched from his hotel balcony, ex-Marine Don Garrison crept along a ledge to grab 10-year-old Hirouki Komiya, who dangled from a railing after his despondent mother tried to push him off.

“We just locked eyes and I kept telling him to hang on,” Garrison said Monday after returning to Los Angeles. “When I pulled him up, he just gave me the greatest hug and said ‘thank you,’ real quiet. I think that is all the English he knew.”

According to Honolulu police, the mother apparently tried to kill the children before jumping to her death Thursday in keeping with a Japanese ritual known as oyako-shinju , or “parent-child suicide”--condoned by tradition, if not law, in that country.

Mother Died Instantly

The boys’ mother, Mariko Komiya, 43, of Osaka apparently died instantly.

A third brother, 4-year-old Satoshi, who had been strapped to his mother’s shoulders for the 70-foot fall, died in a Honolulu hospital.

Police said the woman tried to throw both older children over the balcony, but the 16-year-old, Naomichi, resisted and Hirouki managed to catch and hold onto the railing.

Garrison, who works as a truck dispatcher for a firm in City of Commerce, said he was asleep in his room at the Hilton Hawaiian Village at 10:35 p.m. Thursday when he was awakened by screams of “She’s dead! She’s dead!”

He stepped onto his balcony, at first thinking there had been an accident in the swimming pool far below. But then Garrison saw the pajama-clad boy hanging by his hands from the railing outside an adjacent room and a distraught teen-age boy standing nearby.

“My first assumption was we had two little guys playing,” Garrison said. “But when I looked down and saw the other victims, I realized what had happened.”

Garrison said he motioned to the older boy and he moved to safety.

Then, Garrison said he swung over the railing of his room to face the building, and gradually worked his way, inch by inch, over to the dangling youngster.

“I picked him up under the arms, and he let go right away,” Garrison said. “He was not screaming or kicking or panicked at all. He did not make a noise or say a word the whole time, until I pulled him over.”

Garrison said he stayed near the two boys in their room, because he was afraid they would try to follow their mother. A short while later the father arrived.

“(He) came running up and down the hall yelling ‘My baby! My baby! He was shaking so hard he couldn’t put his key card in the slot.”

Honolulu Police Lt. Gary A. Dias said that members of a tour group traveling with the Komiyas reported that Mariko “blamed herself about a discrepancy in the family’s airline tickets” and that her guilty feelings may have led her to jump.

Japanese women maintain such a close bond to their children that when a mother wants to die, she believes her child wants to die as well, according to Dr. Mamoru Iga, a Japanese-born emeritus professor of sociology at Cal State Northridge.

Iga said a strong prejudice against orphans prevails in his native country, and parents bent on suicide will occasionally kill their children to spare them later shame.

Last April, a Japanese-American woman who was experiencing marital problems set fire to her Anaheim house, killing herself and her two children. And in Santa Monica three years ago, a 32-year-old Japanese-American mother waded into the surf with her son and infant daughter. The woman, Fumiko Kimura, survived the suicide attempt, but both children died.

Although “It still happens quite often,” Iga said the rate of oyako-shinju has declined “significantly” in Japan, from a high of one episode every three days during the 1950s and 1960s. He said no exact figures were available on the rate of decline.

Served 4 Years in Marines

Garrison, who served four years in the Marine Corps--13 months in a reconnaissance battalion in Cambodia--said he does not consider himself a hero.

“To be honest, God is the hero, because he gave that little boy strength to hang on and wait for me,” said the 36-year-old father of two. “I’m not a religious man, but I would do anything in my power to save my kids, or anyone’s kids for that matter.”

Garrison was visiting Hawaii with his fiancee and co-worker, Irma T. Ybarra, who had won the trip as part of a local radio station promotion.

“I could have gone in May,” Ybarra said. “I could have invited a girlfriend. We could have been out to dinner that night. But I think God meant for him to be there.”