Service Held After Body of Local Man Is Found at Site of ’79 Shipwreck

Marine biologist John Naughton Jr. was looking for green turtles on a remote atoll in the Marshall Islands recently when he found something that was thought to be lost forever.

It was the “Sarah Joe,” a small, fiberglass motor boat that disappeared with five men on board during a storm in the Hawaiian Islands nearly 10 years ago. One of the five was a 27-year-old former high school football star from Granada Hills.

And wedged in a pile of stones near the battered boat was a driftwood cross. Nearby, Naughton found a partial set of teeth.

Naughton, a scientist with the National Marine Fisheries Service, recognized the 16 1/2-foot craft because he had helped search for it in 1979.

Remains Identified

Skeletal remains buried under the heap of stones were later identified, using dental and medical records, as Scott Moorman, a former Monroe High School running back who had moved to Maui in the mid-1970s.

No trace of the other four men was found on the atoll, which is about 2,300 miles southwest of Hawaii.

On Saturday, about 100 people gathered in the Little Brown Church in Studio City to eulogize Moorman, who was remembered as a talented athlete, musician and woodworker--and as a free spirit who had always dreamed of living on an island in the Pacific.

On Maui, residents of the small town of Hana, where Moorman and the others lived, are planning to bury the “Sarah Joe” and plant five fir trees on a peninsula in memory of the men who disappeared.

But although the discovery of Moorman’s remains dashed any hopes that he would one day be found alive, it has also reopened the question of what happened after the five men set out from Hana on a daylong fishing expedition on Feb. 11, 1979.

“I used to worry so much when it rained that Scott was wet and cold,” said his mother, Patricia Moorman, 62. “I’m relieved to know he’s not lost in the ocean someplace, but I hurt so much for the other families.”

The men--Moorman, Ralph Malaiakini, 27; Pat Woessner, 26; Benny Kalama, 38, and Peter Hanchett, 31--embarked on the trip to take advantage of a day of good weather following a period of squalls, said Jack Moorman, 61, Scott’s father. But by afternoon, the sky had darkened and the winds whipped the ocean into a flurry of whitecaps, he said. Other boats scurried in to port. But the “Sarah Joe” never returned.

A five-day search by the U.S. Coast Guard proved fruitless, as did a monthlong search financed by friends and relatives of the missing men.

Death Cause Unknown

Nothing more was learned until Naughton found the boat Sept. 9.

Medical examiners at the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory in Hawaii could not determine when Moorman died or the cause of his demise, said Lt. Col. Tom Boyd, a spokesman for the lab.

But many of Moorman’s relatives and friends believe he reached the island alive, only to die from a lack of water. They are angry that the U.S. Coast Guard stopped searching for the missing men five days after they disappeared.

“Scott was a competitor, and I’m positive he battled for his life to the end,” Harry Frum, his football coach at Monroe, said at the memorial.

An investigation is under way in the Republic of the Marshall Islands to determine who buried Moorman, said Scott Chun, a cousin of one of the missing men.

“All this is like ‘The Twilight Zone,’ ” said Moorman’s sister Julie, 34. “We may never have any answers. But then again we didn’t ever really think we’d know this much.”