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By Ronen Zilberman, Star-Bulletin
1st Lt. Ed Larosa and his wife, Traci, yesterday visit the
Punchbowl cemetery, where the remains of Larosa's great
uncle were believed to rest in a grave marked "unknown."
The grave was exhumed yesterday.

Schofield officer certain
DNA testing will verify
great-uncle's remains

---

By Gregg K. Kakesako
Star-Bulletin

A Schofield Barracks infantry officer doesn't believe it's crucial that the remains of his great-uncle, who was killed during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack on Pearl Harbor, ever be identified because "I know where he is."

"He's been buried here for a long time with those he knew well," added 1st Lt. Ed Larosa. His great-uncle, Seaman Apprentice Thomas Hembree, was only 19 when he was killed while serving on the USS Curtis, a seaplane tender.

By Ronen Zilberman, Star-Bulletin
The marker reads, "Unknown, December 7, 1941."

Hembree and Seaman 1st Class Wilson Rice were among the 20 Curtis sailors killed when a bomb pierced the deck of the ship, which was moored in Middle Loch. However, their remains were never identified and they are now believed to share a common grave at the National Cemetery of the Pacific under a headstone marked "Unknown."

In all, 653 Pearl Harbor victims are buried at Punchbowl.

In addition to Hembree and Rice, the U.S. Army Central Identification Laboratory yesterday disinterred what it believes are the remains of Seaman 2nd Class William Goodwin, who was one of the 1,177 sailors killed aboard the USS Arizona nearly 60 years ago.

Along with the Pearl Harbor unknowns, the remains of two soldiers -- reported missing after the Chosin battle in the Korean War -- were removed from their Punchbowl graves and taken to the Army laboratory at Hickam Air Force Base.

Larosa, 32, said there are pictures of "Uncle Tommy" in his grandmother's home in eastern Washington and he remembers his relatives talking about "Uncle Tommy" when he was a child.

"If you think about it, he would be around 70 today," said Larosa, who now serves as a support platoon leader with the 25th Infantry Division's "Wolfhounds."

Between 1993 and 1995, when Larosa pulled his first Schofield Barracks tour of duty he recalls working funeral escorts at Punchbowl, never knowing that a great-uncle was buried there.

With Ray Emory, who manned a .50-caliber machine gun on the decks of the USS Honolulu on Dec. 7, as their guide, Larosa and his wife, Traci, were shown where Hembree was buried. They were then taken to the Courts of Missing, where until 1995 Thomas Hembree's name was inscribed as "Tomas Hembree." The marble tablets list the names of the 18,094 servicemen killed in World War II.

Emory has kept a catalog of the Pearl Harbor dead buried at Punchbowl and repeatedly hounded the military to exhume Hembree and Rice's plot.

Emory was among those who helped correct the misspelling of Hembree's name. He also got U.S. Rep. Patsy Mink to author a new law last year that requires "Dec. 7, 1941" and "USS Arizona" to be placed on 74 grave markers that now are simply identified as "Unknown." Those plots are are believed to hold 124 sets of remains from the battleship.

Gene Castagnetti, Punchbowl cemetery director, said all of those remains exhumed yesterday could be reburied at Punchbowl with an appropriate new headstone. If no identification is made, they will be returned to the same plot with the same epitaph -- "Unknown."