• US soldier's remains come home 62 years after Korean War death

    By Reuters

    NASHVILLE, Tenn. -- A U.S. soldier who left his family farm in Tennessee to volunteer for the Korean War is finally coming home more than six decades later to be buried next to his mother and father, authorities said on Friday.

    With the help of DNA samples provided by his siblings in 2004, the U.S. military identified remains recovered in North Korea as Private First Class Glenn Schoenmann, who was 20 when he died in December 1950.

    Schoenmann was among the nearly 8,000 U.S. troops unaccounted for from the Korean War, which lasted from 1950 until 1953. His remains are due to be brought back to Tennessee's Grundy County on Jan. 10 and he will be buried after a memorial service two days later.


    Schoenmann died just weeks after he was taken prisoner during the Battle of the Chosin Reservoir, according to the Tennessee Department of Veterans Affairs.

    His four surviving siblings never had the opportunity for closure until they were notified by military officials in December that his remains had been identified. It was an occasion for tears, said his brother Raymond Schoenmann, 80, who still lives in rural Grundy County, about 100 miles southeast of Nashville.

    "It was just like it actually just happened," said Schoenmann. His brother Ernest, an Illinois resident who was one of the siblings who provided the DNA samples, told him the news.

    "My brother said he turned away and had to cry when he found out," Raymond Schoenmann said. "I broke into tears when he told me."

    Schoenmann said the family never gave up hope that Glenn's remains would be found, especially after the U.S. government took the DNA samples eight years ago as part of an effort to identify remains buried at POW camps in North Korea during the war.

    North Korean leader Kim Jong Un offers olive branch to South in rare address

    U.S. officials believe major concentrations of remains are located at POW camp burial sites and the Chosin Reservoir area in North Korea.

    Joint recovery efforts to recover soldiers' remains halted in 2005 after the United States cited the uncertain environment created by North Korea's nuclear program.

    'He died for his country'
    Raymond was two years younger than his brother, "but we grew up like twins. We even went to school together. He started a year before me, but he didn't like it. He told my mom and dad 'I ain't going back until Ray starts.' We went all the way through the ninth grade of high school together, then he volunteered and went into the military."

    Raymond Schoenmann recalled when the ominous wartime telegram was delivered to the family's farmhouse.

    "I was still at home and I was over at the barn and I seen the car and knew something was up. I went up to the house and Mom told me she got the telegram that he was missing in action," Schoenmann said. "And she was tore up so bad that I just turned and went back to the barn by myself to cry."

    He volunteered for the Navy the next year.

    "It was pretty hard to leave Mom and Dad after losing a son, but I wanted to get my time over," Raymond Schoenmann said. "I didn't want no part of the Army because it was so quick (between the time) he was in boot camp and he died in Korea."

    North Korea hands over remains of British pilot shot down in Korean War

    Raymond Schoenmann said he used his Navy liberty time to wander around Korea looking for his big brother. "I thought he might run up on me if he was still alive."

    The family had talked in recent years about holding a memorial service and installing a marker over an empty grave near the graves of his parents and grandparents at Brown's Chapel Cemetery near the city of Palmer where he was born.

    Instead, Glenn Schoenmann will be buried there on Jan. 12, his remains placed in a uniform inside the casket.

    "We always were a close family," Raymond Schoenmann said, adding that he feels much better that his brother's remains will be returning to Tennessee.

    Schoenmann said he always thought of his brother as "a war hero, big time. And more so lately."

    "He died for his country," Schoenmann said.

    Copyright 2013 Thomson Reuters. Click for restrictions.

  • Human remains found in Newark suitcase

    By NBCNewYork.com

    A homicide investigation is under way after human remains were discovered in a suitcase near the Passaic River in Newark.

    Police responded to a telephone tip Monday about the gruesome finding in the vicinity of Raymond Boulevard and Van Buren Street, not far from Penn Station.

    The Essex County Prosecutor's homicide task force is also investigating.

    Further details were expected to be released later Monday.

    Read the original story on NBCNewYork.com

    Check back for updates on this developing story.

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  • Pentagon admits it dumped some 9/11 remains in a landfill

    The disclosure that unidentified remains from the 9/11 attack were buried in a landfill was a small part of a larger report on problems at the military's mortuary at Dover, Del. NBC's Jim Miklaszewski reports.

    By M. Alex Johnson, msnbc.com

    Updated at 8:38 p.m ET: For the first time, the Defense Department acknowledged Tuesday that some cremated remains of victims of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks were dumped in a landfill, conduct the White House called "unacceptable."

    The disclosure is just two paragraphs in an 86-page report released Tuesday by an independent task force reviewing operations at the military's mortuary at Dover, Del.

    M. Alex Johnson

    M. Alex Johnson is a reporter for msnbc.com. Follow him on Twitter and Facebook.

    In a contentious briefing for reporters at the Pentagon, retired Army Gen. John Abizaid, the head of the panel, tried to keep the focus on steps the military was taking going forward, saying the 9/11 findings were only a minor part of the task force's work.

    Asked repeatedly for more information, he said, "We did not spend a great deal of time and effort and energy" on the matter, adding forcefully: "It's my report, but it's not the focus of the report."

    Defense Secretary Leon Panetta formed the task force in December after an investigation by the Air Force, which runs the facility, found that some remains of U.S. military personnel weren't handled "in accordance with procedures."

    The Air Force acknowledged that it had disposed of the incinerated remains of at least 274 service members in the landfill before it ended the practice in 2008. At the time, officials said records went back only to 2003.

    But the independent panel found that the practice went back at least to 2001, and it discovered that "several portions of remains" recovered from the 9/11 attacks at the Pentagon and at Shanksville, Pa., also ended up in a landfill:

    Prior to 2008, portions of remains that could neither be tested nor identified, and portions of remains later identified that the [family or other representative] requested not to be notified of (requesting that they be appropriately disposed of) were cremated under contract at a civilian crematory and returned to [Dover]. This policy began shortly after September 11, 2001, when several portions of remains from the Pentagon attack and the Shanksville, Pennsylvania, crash site could not be tested or identified.

    These cremated portions were then placed in sealed containers that were provided to a biomedical waste disposal contractor. Per the biomedical waste contract at that time, the contractor then transported these containers and incinerated them. The assumption on the part of [Dover] was that after final incineration nothing remained. A [Dover] management query found that there was some residual material following incineration and that the contractor was disposing of it in a landfill. The landfill disposition was not disclosed in the contractual disposal agreement.

    Read the full report (.pdf)

    Air Force Secretary Michael Donley and the Air Force chief of staff, Gen. Norton Schwartz, said they hadn't yet had a chance to review the entire report. 

    Erin A. Kirk-Cuomo/Defense Department

    'It's my report, but it's not the focus of the report,' retired Gen. John Abizaid, chairman of the review panel, insisted.

    "This is new information to me," Donley acknowledged when asked about the 9/11 victims by NBC News Pentagon correspondent Jim Miklaszewski. Schwartz, asked the same question, replied, "That's what I'm saying."

    In a statement Tuesday night, the White House said President Barack Obama had been briefed on the findings and was determined that "these types of incidents never happen again."

    Calling the report's details "unacceptable," the White House said, "The United States has a solemn obligation to compassionately and professionally care for fallen service members and their families, and those we tragically lost on 9/11."

    Rep. Rush Holt, D-N.J., who has sought answers to what happened at Dover since last year, said the report bore out what he believed all along.

    "I suspected, as Gen. Abizaid's panel has now confirmed, that these practices had been going on for many years. Even remains from the 9/11 terrorist attacks were treated in this way," Holt said in a statement to msnbc.com.

    "The Department of Defense needs to engage in some real soul-searching," Holt said. "How is it possible that, for years or even decades, no one at Dover recognized how profoundly inappropriate these practices were?"

    'Commanders in name only'
    Abizaid told reporters that the Air Force's complex command structure led to the problems by creating "commanders in name only."

    But "this was not just an Air Force problem," he said, adding that the entire U.S. military "needs to understand this is a 100 percent no-fail mission."

    For one thing, he said, the Dover facility should no longer cremate fallen troops, because "we think it's a bad idea for DoD to be in the cremation business" in the first place.

    The Dover facility is the first point of entry for U.S. service members who are killed or die overseas. It first came under investigation in 2010 after employees complained about how some cases were handled.

    Investigators said last year that they had found no evidence that anyone intentionally mishandled the remains, but they concluded that the mortuary staff failed to "maintain accountability" with some remains.

    "The standard is 100 percent accountability in every instance of this important mission," Schwartz said at the time. 

    "We can, and will, do better, and as a result of the allegations and investigation, our ability to care for our fallen warriors is now stronger,” he said.

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  • After search, Army identifies remains of last unaccounted soldier in Iraq

    By msnbc.com staff

    The U.S. military has identified the remains of the last American service member unaccounted for in Iraq, the Associated Press has reported.

    Staff. Sgt. Ahmed Kousay al-Taie was an Army interpreter from Ann Arbor, Mich. He was born in Iraq and moved to the U.S. as a teenager. He joined the Army Reserve in December 2004.

    The military’s mortuary in Dover, Del. positively identified part of his remains. Army officials provided no details about how his remains were discovered.

    In 2006, al-Taie left Baghdad’s heavily fortified Green Zone by motorcycle to visit his wife, an Iraqi he had married the year before. At his relative’s house, three cars pulled up. Hostage-takers handcuffed al-Taie, then 41, and forced him into one of the cars, Mag. Gen William Caldwell said in a statement in 2006. One of the kidnappers took his cell phone.

    Officials in Iraq offered up to $50,000 for information that would lead to al-Taie, according to an Army press release.

    Caldwell said troops had conducted 51 search operations based on 328 tips. Those raids resulted in 35 suspects, many of whom were detained and offered valuable information, Caldwell said.

    "We have fairly good information that tells us where we think he could still be held and who perhaps may have him," Caldwell said in 2008. Three soldiers were killed and six wounded during those search operations.

    The Associated Press contributed to this report.

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