FL MORRIS / FMORRIS@STARBULLETIN.COM
Services for Jason and Colleen Takamori, who were killed July 6 at the Tantalus lookout, were held yesterday at Mililani Mortuary in Waipio. After the opening oli by Alii Manu O Kai, the Takamoris' daughter, Lianne, was presented with a cape.
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Mourners remember Takamoris with music
Nearly 400 people pay their respects to Jason and Colleen Takamori
A 17-piece band played on as friends and family paid their respects last night to a couple killed by a gunman at a Tantalus lookout on July 6.
"I always knew this time would come, my parents' funeral," Lianne Takamori, Colleen and Jason Takamori's only child, told mourners yesterday. "I never imagined it would happen at the same time, and they were so young." They were both 53.
The upbeat music and the collage of snapshots displayed at the chapel reflected the lives that Colleen and Jason Takamori spent together and with their daughter.
"I couldn't imagine my parents' funeral would be a musical celebration," Lianne Takamori told about 400 mourners gathered last night at the Mililani Memorial Park & Mortuary mauka chapel. "I couldn't ask for anything more."
The Takamoris were two of three people killed July 6. The other victim was cabdriver Manh Nguyen, 50.
Adam Mau-Goffredo, 23, has been indicted for the three killings, a home-invasion robbery later that night and related charges.
Last night, musical tributes came from the many musicians whom Jason Takamori, a bass player, befriended over the years.
The Monday Night Band, the Ebb Tides and the Watanabe Family, all of which Takamori had been a member of, performed, as well as hula halau Alii Manu O Kai, which performed the opening oli.
Lianne Takamori, her voice breaking with emotion as she began, quickly gained her composure as she related, "I think I had a special bond with my parents where we could be ourselves."
She admitted to being a "momma's girl" and how her father joked "if I ever screwed up, it was my mother's fault" but that if she succeeded, it was due to him.
The mother and daughter talked every other night for about an hour on the phone ever since Lianne moved to California for college. On the night of July 6, Lianne spoke with her mother minutes before the shooting. Lianne had just returned to California after a visit to her parents in Honolulu.
"Colleen, Jason and Lianne made many family memories together," said Colleen Takamori's sister Cynthia Lee Calverley. "They will last Lianne a lifetime. For that we are eternally grateful."
She described her younger sister Colleen as someone who could sit on a "bench with a stranger and know their life story in 15 minutes."
"She took a genuine interest in people of all walks of life," Calverley said.
But her family was most important to her, and she "would go without fancy new clothes" so her husband could add to his collection of instruments and other things he collected, and to provide for her daughter.
Jason Takamori's many musician friends from the 1960s to the present were either performing or in attendance.
Mimi Sugane, a singer formerly with the Ebb Tides in the 1970s, said Jason was "very easygoing and would do anything for you."
Kevin Nozawa described his best friend as a "man of many talents."
