A Memorial Day ceremony at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium, Md., will honor three war dead whose remains recently have been identified, as well as eight service members from Maryland who died last year and early this year. (Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens/Facebook)
(Tribune News Service) — When the service members knocked on her door two years ago, Linda Dowling, a retired Department of Defense employee, wondered whether she was in trouble.
But they had come with unexpected news — the military had identified the remains of her uncle, U.S. Navy Seaman 1st Class William Brooks, who died eight decades earlier during the bombing of Pearl Harbor.
“I was in shock,” Dowling said.
Using advances in forensics, the Pentagon is slowly identifying tens of thousands of missing service members and sending their remains home. The transfer from graves of the unknown to the service members’ final resting places, decades after their death, can bring a further sense of closure to families.
Brooks is one of several service members who will be honored Memorial Day during a 10 a.m. ceremony at Dulaney Valley Memorial Gardens in Timonium.
The ceremony will honor three war dead whose remains were recently identified, as well as eight service members from Maryland who died last year and early this year, including Midshipman 2nd Class Luke Gabriel Bird, who died in July during a Naval Academy semester abroad in Chile. A moment of silence will be held for Airman Makai Cummings, a 20-year-old Baltimore City College graduate who was killed this month in a hit-and-run crash in Virginia. He will receive full honors at next year’s ceremony.
Dowling knew her uncle only from stories passed down by her father, as she was born after her uncle’s death during the attacks that prompted the United States’ involvement in World War II. Her father kept a framed photo of Brooks, his half brother, in his bedroom.
Brooks, who was 19 at the time of his death, grew up in Tennessee, but his family moved to Glen Burnie as the war neared so his father could work at a Bethlehem Steel Shipyard. Brooks enlisted in the Navy in 1941, and planned to attend the U.S. Naval Academy after his time serving at Naval Station Pearl Harbor.
“He was just getting ready to start his life,” Dowling said.
Brooks was assigned to the battleship USS Oklahoma, which was attacked by Japanese aircraft during the bombing. After being bombarded, the ship capsized, killing 429 crewmen, according to the Navy. Laboratory testing shortly after the war confirmed only 35 identities of those killed on the Oklahoma. The unidentified sailors were buried in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the “Punchbowl,” in Honolulu.
After its inception in 2015, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency began analyzing unidentified bodies from the mass grave. Partnering with the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, it identified Brooks in 2022 using dental, anthropological and DNA analysis.
Last year, Brooks was brought back to Maryland to be buried at Glen Haven Memorial Park, next to his brother. Despite not knowing her uncle, Dowling recalled the dignified transfer ceremony at BWI Marshall Airport as an incredibly moving experience, noting that hundreds of people were present for the ceremony, which included fire hoses spraying water to form an arch and a motorcade.
“I just barely held it together,” she said. “It was very touching.”
‘Bones can tell you a lot’
While most remains processed by DPAA are taken to a sprawling lab at the agency’s headquarters at Pearl Harbor, Brooks and hundreds of others who died on the Oklahoma had their remains identified at a secondary lab in Nebraska, according to DPAA spokesperson Ashley Wright.
While the DPAA facility in Hawaii contains the largest skeletal identification lab in the world, the smaller lab in Omaha is used due to the “sheer size” of the amount of remains recovered from the Oklahoma, she said.
The branch of the DOD says over 81,000 service members who served during World War II and after are listed as “unaccounted for.” Nearly 1 in 10 became missing in action during World War II, and more than half are believed to be lost at sea.
Wright said the agency is mandated by Congress to identify 200 missing service members every year. It has not been able to meet that goal since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, accounting for 166 service members in the last fiscal year and 76 so far in the cycle that began Oct. 1.
At the labs, forensic anthropologists and scientists use multiple lines of evidence to create a profile of the decedent, including their sex, race, stature, and age at death, Wright said. Materials from the site, such as wedding rings, can help identify a service member. To avoid bias, they follow a blind analysis, not knowing the suspected identity of the remains.
In about three-quarters of their cases, scientists are able to retrieve mitochondrial DNA from bones or teeth and compare samples with those of surviving family members. Bones and teeth also act as a fingerprint that can be compared with military medical records from before a service member’s death.
“Bones can tell you a lot,” Wright said. Changing as a person ages, bones can also help scientists to roughly calculate the age of a service member’s remains.
In the end, the evidence is presented to a DOD medical examiner, who rules whether the remains can be positively identified as a specific service member.
‘We’re finally getting closure’
Others who have recently been identified by the military and will receive honors Monday are Army Cpl. Donald E. Angle of Clear Spring, who was killed in the Korean War, and Army Sgt. Roy Charles “Buddy” DeLauter of Smithsburg, who also died during that conflict.
Angle, an infantryman in the 5th Cavalry Regiment, was killed in 1950 during the Battle of Yongdong in what is now South Korea, according to the DPAA. His remains were recovered a year later, but couldn’t be identified at the time.
The DPAA recovered his remains in 2017 on the belief they were the remains of one of two other missing soldiers. But the DNA profile didn’t match with either of those two soldiers. Further testing determined that the remains belonged to Angle, who was then buried in Pennsylvania in 2019.
DeLauter, a member of the 32nd Infantry Regiment, was reported missing in late 1950 following his unit’s withdrawal from a surprise attack by Chinese forces near the Chosin Reservoir in what is now North Korea, according to the DPAA.
After graduating from Smithsburg High School, DeLauter had married Shirley Viola Brown and enlisted in the Army. Soon after, he was sent to Japan to finish training before heading for Korea, according to his daughter, Sharlene DeLauter.
Most of what Sharlene, who was 3 when her father died, knows about him was passed down from his three sisters, who still live in Western Maryland. He enjoyed singing and learned to play the harmonica at 10, Sharlene wrote in his obituary. He had a “special knack” for finding four-leaf clovers, and was “a tease and jokester,” especially with his siblings.
For over 70 years, the family waited for answers regarding DeLauter’s death. When the military asked the family for DNA samples in the 1980s, Sharlene, who worked as a nurse, drew blood from two of her aunts and passed the specimens on to the military.
DeLauter was identified in 2022 from a lab analysis of the 55 cases of human remains North Korea transferred to the United States in 2018.
It was an emotional day when his family got the call. Sharlene said she was at the doctor’s office with her father’s oldest sister, who was diagnosed with lung cancer moments before the call came from the Pentagon.
“She just burst into tears,” Sharlene DeLauter said. “It was very overwhelming, to think that it’s been more than 70 years and we’re finally getting closure.”
Roy DeLauter was buried in Boonsboro in April 2022 with military honors and a presentation from the DPAA on the identification process. His oldest sister beat cancer.
Sharlene makes sure to encourage others with relatives who went missing at war to submit DNA samples.
“It pays off,” she said.
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