After nearly 84 years, Navy Mess Attendant 3rd Class Neil D. Frye is finally home from Pearl Harbor, Hawaii, and was laid to rest last week in North Carolina.
Frye was only 20 years old when he died on the USS West Virginia during the attack on Dec. 7, 1941, but his family spent a lifetime searching for him since then.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA) announced in December that Frye had been accounted for on Sept. 27.
The USS West Virginia took multiple torpedo hits that killed 106 crewmen on the "date which will live in infamy" when Japan launched a surprise attack on the U.S. fleet stationed at Pearl Harbor. Frye was one of the over 2,000 Americans killed in the strike, which brought the United States into World War II.
Out of his nine siblings, only Frye's youngest sister, Mary Frye McCrimmon, is still alive. At 87 years old, she represented her family as they buried her brother, bringing closure to her family once and for all.
Frye was laid to rest with full military honors at Sandhills State Veterans Cemetery in Spring Lake, North Carolina, on Thursday — coincidentally his 104th birthday — according to NBC affiliate WCNC of Charlotte.
Frye enlisted in the Navy in 1940, leaving when McCrimmon was only 3 years old, NBC affiliate WRAL of Raleigh reported. Although she was young, McCrimmon said, she remembers her brother’s building a sled for her and giving her a tricycle.
“My sister Judy, she used to tell me he could build or make anything,” McCrimmon told WRAL.
McCrimmon recalls having turned 4 years old when her parents told her and her siblings about the loss of their big brother, according to WRAL. But since his body was never recovered, the family thought there could be a possibility he never really died, public broadcaster WHRO public radio of Norfolk, Virginia, reported.
“My mom used to say she loved to people watch,” McCrimmon told WHRO. “She would go anywhere she could get a chance to go to a little town and just watch all the men go by to see if she could see Neil.”
But Neil was still lying in Honolulu, interred in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, with the other sets of remains of unknown crewmen from the USS West Virginia.
McCrimmon and her family began working with DPAA in 2014 to find her brother, according to WHRO. They traveled across North Carolina and to surrounding states attending regional meetings, as fewer and fewer of the siblings remained.
In 2017, the 35 unknown servicemen from the Punchbowl were disinterred and sent to the DPAA laboratory in Hawaii for analysis.
Scientists used dental and anthropological analysis with circumstantial evidence to identify the remains. The Armed Forces Medical Examiner System also conducted Mitochondrial DNA analysis.
A match to Frye was made years later in 2024.
“I was more happy than sad because I knew that they had found him,” McCrimmon told WHRO. “I knew where he was. We didn’t have to wonder.”
Frye's name is among others from World War II on the Walls of the Missing at the Punchbowl, but a rosette will now be added next to his name to mark that he has been found.
He was also posthumously awarded a Purple Heart Medal and a Combat Action Ribbon, among other honors, WCNC reported.
Although their parents did not live to see their son come home, McCrimmon believes they would be relieved by her brother's return, as well.
“I know my mom and dad, there’s any kind of way they know about this, I know they’re some kind of happy,” she told WHRO.