Sharp wits led
officers to ranger
slaying suspect
A Big Island man 'no like
be one hero' for murder
suspect's arrestMourners remember slain ranger
By Rod Thompson
as devout, courageous, peaceable
Star-BulletinHILO -- Samson Wana Jr. was returning home Tuesday afternoon when he saw a man walk out of the scrub brush along Mamalahoa Highway in Kona and try to flag him down.
As Wana, a truck driver, drove past, he noticed three dogs following the man.
"Oh Lord, that's the guy, the one that went shoot the ranger," Wana thought. "My heart was beating 280."
The FBI had put out a description of a suspect wanted for the death Sunday of Kaloko-Honokohau National Historic Park ranger Steve Makuakane-Jarrell. They were looking for a 6-foot man, about 30, with three dogs.
Wana, 34, 6 feet 3 inches and 275 pounds, backed up his truck thinking, "He's going to do something because he knows he's wanted."
He tried calling for help on his CB radio but got no answer.
The would-be hitchhiker, later identified by the FBI as Eugene Frederick Boyce III, walked to the camper-covered back of the truck as if to put his dogs inside.
"He was getting nervous, like nervous out," Wana said.
Wana got out, flagged down another car, and whispered to the driver that the hitchhiker was the man who shot the ranger. The driver turned out to be from the sheriff's office.
Boyce started to loosen the grip on the leash of one of his dogs, but Wana said he had a 6-inch hunting knife.
"It's going to be your dogs if you get crazy, brah," he warned Boyce.
Wana ordered Boyce to stand next to the truck, and Boyce answered: "You're crazy. You're nuts."
Boyce started to walk away down an embankment, but he "went huli," tumbling down the slope, Wana said.
With the bushes and grass only waist high, there was no place for Boyce to hide. And he had to walk on old, rough a'a lava.
"I was like, 'This guy ain't too bright,'" Wana said.
As Wana walked along the road keeping an eye on Boyce in the distance, Wana's boss drove up and stopped. He couldn't believe Wana had found the wanted man.
A bit later -- the whole thing took 15 to 20 minutes -- a helicopter showed up and began circling above Boyce.
Then a series of FBI and police cars arrived, and officers went into the lava field after Boyce, who was now out of sight beyond a ridge.
Wana heard a voice on a radio call for "animal control."
Then he heard the suspect was detained.
"Right on. They got him," he thought. Then a thought struck him. "I wasn't thinking about the gun. What if the brother had the gun with him?"
The FBI later said Boyce had hidden the gun at the scene of the shooting.
Attending the wake service last night for Makuakane-Jarrell, whose wife is his relative, Wana spent most of his time in the parking lot where he wouldn't be noticed.
"I no like be one hero," he said. "I give God all the glory."
Mourners remember
By Rod Thompson
slain ranger as devout,
courageous, peaceable
Star-BulletinHILO -- National park ranger Steve Makuakane-Jarrell was a devout man who enjoyed Bible study, speakers at his wake service said last night.
Even on their honeymoon on Maui, his wife, Joni Mae, couldn't get him to come out of the next room because he was busy reading "the Good Book," said ranger Mardie Lane.
Finally he did emerge, and Joni Mae learned the Good Book in this case was "Pidgin to the Max."
The Makuakane family from Hawaii, the Jarrell family from Georgia and the national park "family," including the director of the National Park Service, Robert Stanton, from Washington, D.C., attended a wake service for Makuakane-Jarrell last night.
They described a man as many-sided as the lover of God's word and the lover of the pidgin words of Hawaii's people.
Scott McElveen, the chief ranger at John Day Fossil Beds National Monument in Oregon, said he attended the 1986 training session in Arizona where Steve and Joni Mae met.
McElveen read a statement from the Jarrell family:
In Georgia, Steve drove a BMW but lived in a sharecropper's house, they said.
He would chop firewood while listening to a stereo play the music of Johann Sebastian Bach. And he didn't allow disharmony in his life. As a child, if an argument broke out over toys, he would either share his or drop them and move on to something else, they said.
Ranger Lane described him as an adult.
"He was skinny, but he was as strong as a bear, and he was as gentle as a lamb," Lane said. "His hug took your breath away."
"His eyes sparkled. They twinkled. He was exotic in a handsome way."
He came from a loving family, McElveen said. Every Sunday, he would phone family members back in Georgia.
"Steve, very thankfully, did that Sunday morning before he went to work," McElveen said.
The Jarrell family described another incident from Makuakane-Jarrell's life, the time he set his new boots in the driveway and sprayed water repellent on them.
For years afterward, whenever it rained, his footprints would be revealed on the driveway.
Today, the footprints have all but disappeared, his family wrote.
But the footprints of his courage and goodness will remain, they said.
A funeral service had been planned for Makuakane-Jarrell at 1:30 p.m. today at the Church of Holy Apostles. The time remained the same, but so many people were expected to attend that the location was changed to the Edith Kanakaole Tennis Stadium.
