ASSOCIATED PRESS Petty Officer 3rd Class Alfred E. Livingston, seen in this Navy photo, died in the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941. |
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Sailor killed in Pearl Harbor attack buried in Indiana
Alfred E. Livingston's remains were not identified for 65 years
Associated Press
WORTHINGTON, Ind. » The remains of a sailor from southern Indiana killed during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor 65 years ago were finally laid to rest yesterday in his hometown.
Petty Officer 3rd Class Alfred E. Livingston of Worthington was a crew member aboard the USS Oklahoma when Japanese planes and submarines attacked it and 20 other ships of the U.S. Pacific fleet on Dec. 7, 1941.
The Navy said Livingston's body was identified after a World War II historian contacted the military last February with suspicions that an unidentified body might be Livingston, citing that only two men with that last name had been killed at Pearl Harbor.
The remains were disinterred and matched after dental records and skeletal structures were compared, said Chief Petty Officer Hugh C. Laughlin of the Navy Office of Community Outreach in Indianapolis.
Genetic testing was impossible because formaldehyde had corrupted remaining DNA, Laughlin said.
Livingston's nephew, Ken Livingston, 57, of Indianapolis, said the return of his uncle to the family in the Greene County town of Worthington, about 30 miles southeast of Terre Haute, ends years of speculation.
"Some thought he went down with the ship," Livingston said. "Some even thought he might have been on the Arizona. At least now we know the whole story."
The Navy said military officials sorting the dead after the attack mistakenly identified Livingston's body as a crew member aboard the Arizona. Unable to match his remains to a ship roster then, they identified his body as X-99 and buried him in Hawaii.
More than 3,500 U.S. service members were killed or wounded in the Japanese raid that pushed the United States into World War II.