After 84 years, the remains of U.S. Navy Mess Attendant 3rd Class Neil D. Frye, killed during the Pearl Harbor attack, were identified and returned to his family. His sister, Mary Frye McCrimmon, 87, laid him to rest with full military honors on what would have been his 104th birthday. The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency used DNA and anthropological analysis to confirm his identity after years of searching by his family. Frye’s remains were recovered from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific and his name will now be marked with a rosette on the Walls of the Missing.
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In November 2009, construction workers near Hoover Dam stumbled upon human remains, sparking a 15-year-long mystery. Despite extensive efforts, the identity of the deceased, known only as John Doe, remained unknown. The breakthrough came in 2022 when forensic genetic genealogy, a relatively new technique, was used to analyze the victim’s DNA and identify potential relatives. This led investigators to William Herman Hietamaki, a man last seen in 1995, who had a history of traveling across the country. Through interviews and DNA testing, Hietamaki was definitively identified as John Doe. While the cause of death remains undetermined, forensic genetic genealogy provided closure to a long-unsolved case and highlighted the emerging power of this technology in identifying victims in cold cases.
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John Q. Hosedrinker