Virginia Marine Identified 70 Years After Being Killed in Korea

“We just wanted to cry for him because you think, here is a young 22-year-old, he had to be terrified, knowing there was no way out,” Neely said.

“And he lost his life,” she said. “I’m just about to cry now. But we are blessed that we can bring him home now.”

Ellis, a private first class with Headquarters Company, 1st Service Battalion, 1st Marine Division, was until recently one of the more than 7,500 Americans still unaccounted for almost seven decades after the end of the Korean War.

An extensive federal effort has been launched to identify and repatriate the remains of the nation’s fallen service members from this and other wars.

That includes a years-long push to discover the names of nearly 850 people whose remains were returned to the U.S. during Operation GLORY — an exchange of military war dead organized with North Korea after the conflict’s armistice — but not successfully identified at the time.

Neely and her family were notified of the identification project almost a decade ago. She and her daughter traveled to Washington, D.C., and submitted DNA for the research. It was there that she first learned more about her uncle’s service.