At first, it looked as if the 14-year-old girl from Miliani was floating playfully with her friends in the whitecapped water off Ke Iki Beach on the North Shore of Oʻahu.
But as she drifted 20 feet from shore, the teen’s head dipped below the surface and a tourist watching from his vacation rental realized she was in trouble. The Portland lawyer jumped into the 10-foot waves pushing her toward the jagged rocks and heaved her onto the shore, unconscious but alive.
“If anything comes out of this,” the man told a newspaper reporter in 1989, when the incident occurred, “I hope it’s more warning signs and safety equipment.”…