News-Info-Alerts

Re: DNA Hopes

To: ALL

From: Andi Wolos & Bob Necci

(POW-MIA InterNetwork)

Date: July 08, 2002

"Woman hopes DNA tests can ID brother

AVI STEINHARDT/Courier-Post
Courier-Post Staff
CLAYTON

Far out where flowers are blooming, Out where skies are blue, I send a host of good wishes, and Aloha to you.

"He sent his Christmas cards early," Joan Burke remembers with fondness, looking at the 1941 greeting card from her brother.

Harold K. Costill, an 18-year-old Navy enlistee from Clayton, mailed the card to his family from Hawaii. He was a crewman aboard the USS West Virginia, on "Battleship Row" in Pearl Harbor.

Costill, also the brother of former Clayton Mayor Eugene Costill, was killed Dec. 7, 1941, in the Japanese raid on Pearl Harbor.

Of the 2,340 Navy casualties in the attack that propelled the United States into World War II, Harold Costill was one of 647 whose bodies were never identified. Their remains are in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific on Honolulu under stone markers that simply say " Unknown."

That was never good enough for Joan Costill Burke, now 71, who was 10 when a telegram arrived to say her brother was missing. This past December, she provided a blood sample to a military laboratory and is waiting to hear whether DNA tests on remains from the graves of the unknowns will identify her brother.

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The Department of Defense began a program in 1999 to use DNA technology to identify Korean War and World War II remains previously classified as unknown. Those include 33 unidentified bodies recovered from the West Virginia.

"It bothered me that he's classified as unknown," Burke said of her brother. "He was a great guy."

Ginger Couden, spokeswoman for the Army Central Identification Laboratory, said DNA is one of many tools used in the identification process. The Hawaii laboratory's mission is to recover and identify remains of personnel from all armed services branches.

So far, DNA testing hasn't identified any remains disinterred from the Honolulu cemetery, Couden said.

The remains of two unknown soldiers believed to be from the Korean War were examined in 1999. "We believe there may have been a hardening compound used as a preservative on the remains. One possibility is the hardening process may have inhibited the lab's ability to extract usable DNA," Couden said.

Four additional unknown soldiers - two from the Korean War and two from the Pearl Harbor attack - were disinterred from the cemetery last year, with the same results.

"We're currently trying to develop new procedures" to extract DNA from the remains for testing, Couden said. Preliminary tests are promising, but no additional disinterments are planned "until technology is further developed," Couden said. However, the laboratory encourages relatives to provide blood samples for future testing, she said.

If Harold Costill is identified, Burke said, she and her other three brothers would discuss whether to bring the remains home to Cedar Green Cemetery in Clayton. The Navy paid for a marble marker there with Harold's name on it in 1961.

Her brother Gene Costill said he admires Burke's determination to find their brother.

"My personal belief is he belongs with his shipmates," said Costill, who served in the Coast Guard in World War II, on North Atlantic convoy duty. "But I wouldn't do a thing to discourage her, because it means so much to her."

Burke has never forgotten the day more than 60 years ago when she learned the dreaded news about her brother.

In December 1941, a local Western Union deliveryman, who knew the Costill family, sat in his car outside their house for a half-hour before he could summon the nerve to knock on the door and present the Navy telegram, Burke recalled.

The family had heard about the Pearl Harbor attack as they huddled around the radio. While President Franklin Roosevelt addressed the nation, "all I remember is starting to run upstairs. I cried and cried," Burke said.

"It was a horrible Christmas that year and a good many years after that," said Burke, who lives with her husband, Richard, in the Clayton home where she was born.

She learned from a survivor that her brother, a lanky outdoorsman who joined the Navy to learn a trade, had gone on duty in the engine room just before the attack.

"They hit right where he was," she said. "That's why we always felt there probably wasn't anything left."

In 1951, the family received a notice from the Navy that seemed to be the final word about Harold. "Evidence does not exist to contradict the finding of non-recoverability," it said.

And her brother had good teeth, so dental records haven' t helped, Burke said.

A year after her mother's death in 1962, Burke said, her family gave permission to name the borough's new Veterans of Foreign Wars post for Harold Costill. The Costill post is still on Washington Avenue. Gene Costill is a charter member and arranges the borough's annual Memorial Day program.

Burke said she learned about the possibility of using DNA tests to identify war casualties from news articles and Internet research.

She contacted a military laboratory in Rockville, Md., last year for a test kit. "I had my doctor all lined up," she said.

After she sent the blood sample, "I got word from them it was in the database and might take a long time," Burke said. "It's like, get in line."

Adding to identification problems are combined graves in the so-called Punchbowl Crater cemetery on Honolulu, Burke said. "There was a lot of co-mingled corpses put together. It's going to make it hard."

Burke, who's uncomfortable with flying, has never visited Hawaii. Her brother Gene and his son went there for the 25th anniversary of the attack and saw the Pearl Harbor memorials. "Maybe someday, I don't know," she said.

She has communicated via e-mail with several USS West Virginia survivors, among them a ship postmaster who recalled returning mail for Harold after the attack, including Christmas presents sent to him from relatives. She has also posted excerpts from letters her brother sent home on the ship's Web site, www.usswestvirginia.org.

In a Nov. 28, 1941 letter, the proud Navy man wrote: "Dad ain't just a-lying when he said that the Germans are playing with dynamite when they start monkeying with Uncle Sam's Navy. I guess the Japs knew better than to try anything with us. We don't have to worry about any country, we can lick them all."

His last letter was dated Dec. 3, a week before his first full year in the Navy. "If I had to do it over, I would join up in a second," he wrote. Burke said their parents had to give permission for him to enlist because he was just 17.

After Dec. 7, Burke said, her parents for many years hated the Japanese. "I guess a lot of families were that way," she said.

Burke said she hasn't harbored the same feelings. Indeed, her son, who served in the Air Force for 20 years, married a Japanese woman. "You can't live with grudges like that," she said.

Copyright 2002 Courier-Post."