Tension of hunt ‘overwhelming’ for kamaaina in Boston area

Scores of Hawaii natives living in Boston, including students at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Harvard and Boston University, spent an emotionally draining Friday glued to their televisions and computers and stuck in their homes as police tracked down the Boston Marathon bombing suspects.

For Punahou School graduate Mimi Palmore, who works in advertising in Boston, the tense daylong search was the stunning culmination to a “surreal week.”

“It’s been nerve-wracking,” said Palmore, 25. “I’ve just been going back and forth, watching the news and then distracting myself from the news.”

Palmore was holed up in her apartment about five miles from Watertown, where law enforcement centered much of the day’s manhunt for 19-year-old suspect Dzho­khar Tsar­naev, and where he was ultimately found.

Palmore said the sirens and helicopter noise began at about 1 a.m. and continued throughout Friday evening.

When law enforcement finally lifted the lockdown, Palmore and her roommates went outside and played an impromptu game of baseball in a small field nearby. She said others also began streaming out of their homes.

“Our town woke up,” she said. “Coffee shops were opening. Stores were opening. People wanted to get out of their houses because it’s tough being cooped up.”

Several Hawaii students at Boston-area universities said they started getting text messages from worried families and friends in the wee hours of the morning East Coast time, as news began to break that the two bombing suspects were involved in a car chase and a gunbattle and were linked to the slaying of an MIT police officer.

Punahou graduate Anna Merrifield, an MIT senior, said the news has at times been “overwhelming.”

Merrifield was in her sister’s apartment in West Cambridge, a little west of the MIT campus, when she got word that a campus police officer had been shot Thursday night. She said law enforcement panned across the area, and residents were urged to stay put. The bombing suspects dropped off their carjacking hostage, she said, about three minutes from where she was staying.

“There were some tense moments,” she said.

Merrifield said in the wake of the bombing, and then the events of Friday, Bostonians have banded together to deal with their loss and to support each other.

She added that she immediately recognized the MIT officer killed as 26-year-old Sean Collier because he was one of the younger officers on campus and because he was so involved in various campus clubs.

“He was a very well-liked officer,” she said. “It’s such a tragedy that he was lost.”

Kamuela Yong, 28, of Wai­ma­nalo arrived in Boston last week with his wife for a visiting-scholar position at MIT. He found out early Friday that the MIT officer gunned down was killed right in front of where his new offices are.

Yong and his wife were also about 20 to 30 yards from the two blast sites at the Boston Marathon on Monday.

Suffice it to say, Yong said, it’s been a tough week.

When reached Friday at his apartment in Boston, Yong said he was “very shaken up.”

Yong added that seeing the city on lockdown — with major thoroughfares deserted but for emergency personnel — was eerie. “It was a ghost town,” he said.

Ryan Lau, an MIT sophomore studying computer science, sheltered in place much of the day at his fraternity house, about a half-mile from campus.

He said the mood among the fraternity’s members was somber.

“People are just staying indoors, just sort of waiting it out,” he said by phone.

At Harvard University, freshman Elena Hoffenberg woke up early Friday to text messages from family in Hawaii asking whether she was OK. She then learned the university had been placed on lockdown and, as at all area campuses, classes had been canceled.

Hoffenberg said students were leaving their dorm rooms only to eat at the campus dining halls and weren’t lingering outdoors for long.

“We’ve been watching the news, keeping up with what’s happening,” she said.

There are about 20 undergraduate students from Hawaii at Harvard, she estimated. About a dozen more attend MIT.

Many more Hawaii students attend other area campuses, including Boston University.

At midday Friday Eastern time, Boston University freshman Ericka Saito was in her dorm, keeping abreast of the news and feeling a little homesick.

“It’s been a very tense situation,” she said. “The bombing, when it happened, was hard to contemplate, and now this. Especially coming from Hawaii, you want to be home.”

Hawaii native Al Wong, who has lived in Boston for nearly four decades, said he had planned to leave a fern lei Friday near the site of the Boston Marathon bombings.

The manhunt and call to stay indoors scrapped those plans, leaving him spending the day watching the news and checking on neighbors.

But Wong said he’ll go out today to leave that lei, if for no other reason than to help him come to terms with all that has happened.

“It’s a gesture of aloha,” he said. “I wanted to do something not only as a person who lives in Boston, but as a Hawaiian.”