WWII Livermore Airman Laid To Rest After 81 Years: Reports

LIVERMORE, CA — A Livermore man finally came home Memorial Day, over 80 years after he disappeared in World War II.

Lt. Thomas Kelly Jr, who was killed in 1944 after his plane was shot down in Papua New Guinea, was taken in a procession from San Leandro to Monte Vista Memorial Gardens and Mortuary in Livermore, where his casket lay in repose.

On Monday, his casket went on a public procession through downtown Livermore, passing the home where he grew up, and Livermore High School, where he attended to St. Michael's Church and Cemetery, where a private ceremony and burial with full military honors was held. He will lie in rest at St. Michael's Church and Cemetery in Livermore.

"It's almost indescribable what this is going to mean for us," Kelly's first cousin Sandy Althaus, who was three when he died, told CBS News. "Twelve days after Tommy died in 1944, the family gathered [at Livermore's] St. Michael's Church for a funeral mass, but without a funeral, because his body never came back, and this Memorial Day, our extended family living relatives, will be gathered in the same church with a casket and with a journey from that church to where his parents and his sister are buried, and he's finally going to be laid to rest with them in a way that they never could have imagined."

In March 1944, Kelly 21 years old and deployed on a plane called "Heaven Can Wait" stationed on the northern coast of Papua New Guinea, according to a news release from the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA.) On March 11, the plane exploded and crashed, likely due to anti-aircraft fire. Aircraft searched for survivors, but none were found. After the war, the American Graves Registration Service conducted exhaustive searches of the area, but in 1950, officials said that they could not find any remains of Kelly or the other crew members.

Between 2013 and 2017, the Kelly Family undertook a dedicated archival research effort to collect historical documents and eyewitness accounts of the "Heaven Can Wait" crew, according to the DPAA. In October 2017, Project Recover, a DPAA partner organization, located the wreckage of B-24 aircraft in Hansa Bay while making sonar scans. In 2019, a DPAA underwater investigation team conducted several surveys of the wreckage.

In March and April of 2023, an underwater recovery team excavated the crash site, where they recovered osseous materials and material evidence, including life support equipment and identification tags. Scientists from DPAA used dental and anthropological analysis, and scientists from the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System used mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) and Y-chromosome DNA analysis.