MT. VERNON, Ill. (WSIL) -- The last time Sergeant Howard Malcolm set foot in Illinois was 1949 when he enlisted in the U.S Army.
In 1950, Malcolm was captured during the Korean War and died a year later in a prisoner of war camp.
Fast forward to 2023. Malcolm's remaining family attended his funeral Tuesday, the bow on the gift his niece Theresa Slater didn't expect to receive.
"Isn't this marvelous? I'm just one of the lucky ones," Slater said.
Slater certainly is lucky as there are more than 80,000 Americans who haven't come home and are POWs or missing in action (MIA) according to the Department of Defense.
In 1954, Korea agreed to return American remains to the U.S. as part of Operation Glory. There were 652 sets of remains that the U.S. buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu Hawaii.
Those remains sat for 64 years before being disinterred in 2018 for a special project to identify them. In 2022, DNA technology identified the remains of 'Unknown X-14357' as Sergeant Howard Malcolm of Mt. Vernon.
"That made me feel really good knowing that he wasn't in the bottom of a swamp some place," Slater said."He's got enough to make a whole body including a skull."
Most of Howard's bones were found minus a finger and some bones in his neck. If found, Slater says the army offered to put together a special funeral to cremate those remains and dump them into the ocean.
More than 7,500 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War which is why Slater calls herself 'lucky'.
Malcolm's body is now home, lying next to his brother and nephew at Bethel Memorial Cemetery. Slater now gets to place flowers at three different graves. A family reunited in death but celebrated in life.
"God has known where he was," Slater said. "We just didn't know.
"Now we know."
