World War II veteran buried next to his family 80 years after his death | Mid-Missouri News

A World War II veteran was buried next to his parents Saturday in Howard County, even though he died 80 years ago.

Merchant Marine Wiper Elvis Spotts died at the age of 19 on February 22, 1944, while serving in the Army.

On Saturday, his family had a memorial service honoring Spotts’ life, followed by burial at Wesley Chapel Cemetery.

The current army attended the ceremony and played Taps with a trumpet and folded an American flag.

Spotts enlisted in the U.S. Marines in 1943, where he became a crew member of the SS Cape Isabel, a ship that carried military cargo alongside two other ships.

Spotts was a windshield wiper, responsible for cleaning a ship’s engine spaces and machinery and assisting the ship’s engineers. The windshield wiper is training to be an oiler.

According to a U.S. Navy news release, Spotts was in the central Pacific Ocean about 12 miles off the coast of Tarawa Atoll on the day he passed, delivering supplies to nearby Betio Island.

He was in the process of properly closing the engine room hold when he accidentally dropped a portable hand lamp, shattering the vapor glass and short-circuiting the lamp. In an attempt to retrieve the lamp, Spotts was electrocuted and died.

The next day he was buried at the US Marine Cemetery on Betio.

In 1947, 532 sets of remains were recovered from Betio and returned to the US

“I always got the impression that the family thought he was buried at sea and never expected him to get the body back,” said his oldest living relative, Linda Frink.

Frink was just a baby when Spotts died, but he knew his parents very well.

“It was such an honor,” said Mary Jarboe, Frink’s sister. “We wish all the ancestors could be here because we were all good friends with his parents.”

After years of searching and identifying remains, a non-profit organization called History Flight, Inc. Spotts in 2017 and accompanied him to Hawaii.

Through mitochondrial DNA analysis, scientists attributed the remains to Wiper Spotts.

Genealogists then contacted his close relatives, who gave their relative a place of rest.

“There’s a pretty big book on the process of collecting DNA and sending it in,” said Susan Donnelly, another sister of Frink and Jarboe.

“They have so many people trying to find them and get them placed that it just takes a long time to get them to the family where they belong.”

The sisters’ father was Spotts’ first cousins.