The boys pooled their money for a bouquet of flowers and lei, and student Vincent Domantay, who had worked with him for nearly four years, took the Catholic cross from around his neck and hung it gently over a homemade wooden cross they erected on campus.

"This is the first time I've lost someone this close," said Domantay. "I grew up and didn't know any of my grandpas. He was like a grandpa."

The white cross stands next to a profusion of red and pink ginger Okuda had planted to improve the grounds around three UH dormitories.

A cross was erected behind Hale Laulima dormitory at UH-Manoa to honor Harris Okuda. The UH maintenance worker died Thursday when he fell through the roof of a maintenance shed behind the dorm. Eugene Tanner • The Honolulu Advertiser

Okuda was found on the floor of a garden shed behind the Hale Laulima dorm Thursday night, a rake he had been using still balanced on the roof that he might have been clearing of leaves. Students said they thought he had been sweeping the roof to get it ready for a second coat of paint.

The city medical examiner's office yesterday said his death was an accident and that he died of head injuries.

Yesterday, Okuda's children raised questions about why no one looked for their father, who left work promptly each day at 2 p.m. and whose car was in the parking lot long after that on Thursday, the day he died.

"He was left dying and we felt he could have been saved," said Roy Okuda, eldest of the four Okuda children.

"We're not blaming anybody. We're just asking why no one looked for him."

Roy Okuda, who lives on Maui, said the family was told that someone heard a loud thump between 7:30 a.m. and 8 a.m. that day. Police have said that Okuda had been reported missing or overdue.

"We think the accident happened early in the morning and they didn't find him until evening," Roy Okuda.

"He was left laying there for 12 hours. We feel there are a lot of questions and someone needs to answer."

UH Housing director Margit Watts said the family has raised a good question that can't be answered.

"Administratively, we're going to look into it," she said.

She said Okuda, like other groundskeepers, came to work and had his own independent duties. Ku'ulei Pau, Okuda's immediate supervisor, said she didn't always see Okuda because the area for which he was responsible was so large.

"There are days we see each other and days we don't," Pau said.

As news of his death spread to those who worked with him, and students in the dorm next to his work area, sadness spread too.

To the housing staff, Okuda was a mainstay, the one who scavenged endlessly and always thought of the students. Carefully tucked into plastic bags in the refrigerator in his office are a large collection of seeds, dried and stored and ready for planting. On the fridge is a neatly detailed planting schedule for the dozens of young palms, bougainvillea and other shrubs he was nurturing in a haphazard collection of old paint cans and assorted other scavenged containers behind the dorm.

"He always felt there was a use for everything," said Pau, residence life coordinator for the dorms he cared for. "If there was any funny-looking container that could hold dirt, like a Styrofoam cooler, he'd use it as a pot."

In the cramped office Okuda called a headquarters, next to a student activity center with a pingpong table, he decorated walls with cast-offs from student rooms at semester's end and odds and ends he had scavenged.

Hanging by a string from an overhead water pipe is a ratty rooster made of faded plastic twine. An old plastic snorkel was tucked at the top of a blue-blanketed couch where he'd curl up at 4:30 in the morning when he arrived at work to beat the traffic in from 'Aiea.

And Okuda was generous. Eggplant and lettuce and papaya he grew out back were often handed out to the cleaning staff or left on the handle of Pau's door for her or the office secretary.

Outside on the edge of the lawn, a dozen raised planting beds had been prepared as student gardens, carefully tended by Okuda and his boys, and built with scavenged lumber. They'll be named in his memory when they are dedicated next month, said Watts, and offered to students as personal gardens.

"He was tough — skinny but tough," said Linda Fujiki, the office secretary, who often joined him at lunch or during break to whack the haole koa or wild pampas grass that grew behind the dorms.

"We'd have to come and tell him 'Harris, it's too hot out here for you. Let the young boys come out.' A lot of times he over-exerted."

Manoa chancellor Peter Englert issued a statement earlier yesterday offering condolences to Okuda's family and praising him as caring and conscientious. "He will be missed," said Englert.