This wasn’t the anniversary telescope technician Tony Sylvester was expecting.
This wasn’t the anniversary telescope technician Tony Sylvester was expecting.
After considering taking the day off to mark 28 years at the Very Long Baseline Array, the 51-year-old Hilo resident instead spent the morning barricaded in a room with a co-worker desperately trying to hold back a man who rammed his way into the isolated radio telescope building below Mauna Kea’s summit with his truck.
“We had to pile all of the furniture and wedge the door so he couldn’t get in,” Sylvester said. “He spent 45 minutes trying to break into the door.”
The strange event started when the assailant, who police identified as 30-year-old Kailua-Kona resident James Coleman, allegedly tailed station manager Bill Hancock to the telescope site, located between two cinder cones at the 12,200-foot elevation.
The two men are used to working by themselves, out of the way of visitors and the rest of the telescopes on the mountain. They soon realized something wasn’t right, and it wasn’t just a case of altitude sickness.
“You need water?” Sylvester said he asked.
“I wanna get in your building,” the man replied.
Sylvester said he and Hancock hurried back inside and locked the office’s double steel doors.
He said Coleman then allegedly rammed through the telescope’s gate and plowed into the workers’ trucks, totaling their vehicles.
But that wasn’t the end of it.
Hearing the truck back up, Sylvester said he knew the assailant was giving himself room for a “running start.”
He said he and his co-worker ran into the main room as Coleman allegedly used his truck as a battering ram against the front doors, eventually breaking them apart on the third try, giving him access to the foyer.
“It’s lucky I heard him … back up,” Sylvester said. “He came launching.”
“We would have been crushed at that point,” he said.
Sylvester said he already called police from the telescope’s phone (there is no cell service at that location), giving them up to an hour to fend for themselves. He said a Mauna Kea ranger arrived, but the unarmed Office of Mauna Kea Management employee had to retreat.
After breaking in, Sylvester alleges Coleman tore out their communication system before using anything at his disposal — a large rock, fire extinguisher and shovel — to try to reach them in the barricaded room.
“He was looking through the crack. ‘Let me in!’” Sylvester said Coleman exclaimed.
“We were hoping he would just tire out.”
In the meantime, Sylvester said they tried to talk Coleman down while waiting for police to make the long drive up the mountain.
“I never felt so threatened in my life,” he said. “This might have well been the scene from ‘The Shining’ with the ax on the door.”
After arriving, police arrested Coleman on suspicion of criminal property damage. He is being detained at South Hilo cellblock pending further investigation.
Sylvester estimates Coleman caused $40,000 to $50,000 in damage.
But why remained unclear.
He said Coleman, whom he described as “haole,” made no mention of the controversial Thirty Meter Telescope, strongly opposed by some Native Hawaiians, or other contentious issues surrounding Mauna Kea management.
Still, Sylvester, who notes he was threatened by one anti-TMT protester last year, thinks the strong rhetoric surrounding those issues might have been a factor.
“I think this guy wanted to come up here and get his five minutes of fame” close to the one-year anniversary of roadblocks that stopped TMT construction work, he said.
“No Hawaiians I know would want something like this to happen,” Sylvester added. “It’s not the spirit of aloha.”
Other than some bruising, neither of the employees were injured.
Lanakila Managauil, one of the TMT protest leaders, said he was not aware of Coleman and knew little about the events of the day.
He said an anti-TMT vigil is planned for today at the Mauna Kea Visitor Information Station, and the ban on violence or vandalism called “kapu aloha” remains the rule.
The Mauna Kea Access Road was closed Tuesday as police investigated the incident.
VLBA issued a press release stating the 25-meter-diameter radio antenna is undamaged.
The VLBA consists of 10 identical telescopes in different locations between Hawaii and the Virgin Islands. It is controlled remotely from New Mexico and operated by the National Radio Astronomy Observatory.
Email Tom Callis at tcallis@hawaiitribune-herald.com.