New Jersey

WWII Vet's Remains Found After Missing for 77 Years. Now NJ Family Finally Has Closure

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It took 77 years, but a World War II veteran's remains were found at last and he is finally being laid to rest as his family gets the closure they so desperately sought for decades.

First Lt. Jack Heffernan was just 24 years old, on his third tour, navigating a B25 bomber with six other crew members over the skies of Myanmar (known at the time as Burma). He and the other crew members were trying to hold off a Japanese invasion of neighboring India on Feb. 22, 1944.

"Did you ever see 'Bridge on the River Kwai?' That’s the railroad they were bombing," said Andrew McVeigh, Heffernan's nephew. "They were flying up to bomb a rail yard and at very low level, and the plane on the way in was hit by anti-aircraft fire, caught fire crashed and burned."

Another aircraft on that mission took a picture of the wreckage, but with conflicting stories of what happened to the air crew, Heffernan was listed as missing. Near the war’s end, he was declared killed in action.

"There was never a funeral because we are Catholic, and you have to have a body to have a funeral mass," said McVeigh. "We're a very religious family, so there was this aspect of loss that we couldn't even have a mass for this guy."

In 2015, a notice came to the family from Fort Knox.

"They sent us a letter saying we’re collecting bank of DNA in case anything is ever found. We’re contacting the families of everyone who has someone missing in action," McVeigh said.

In 2021, an Army team returned to Myanmar and found a 93-year-old living witness to the crash. They started digging and unearthed a collarbone and a few teeth — but it was enough for a DNA match. Heffernan's were the only remains they found.

"I was shocked. Who figures? Seventy-eight years," said McVeigh.

Students at Hampton Public School got to learn about D-Day, World War II as they met the 99-year-old veteran. NBC New York's Brian Thompson reports.

The Army visited the nephew's home in February with a 100-page report detailing what happened to his uncle. The military also delivered posthumously awarded medals; among them, a purple heart, along with other material recovered.

"This was part of a binocular. The navigators were the guys that would have binoculars, and these are the buttons from his uniform," McVeigh said.

After her eldest son disappeared, Mary Heffernan searched relentlessly for him, writing countless letters to the military. It was just after she had received a small check for some money that was found in his locker that she wrote, "I’m keeping it for the day God willing he returns home, I know i will see him again."

"I would go to Burma if I could, to find the body I so tenderly cared for and that the other six families will be able to bury their loved ones," she later wrote.

"One of the things I hope...is the other six families get what we got," said McVeigh.

Almost 80 years after Ozzie Fletcher was wounded in the aftermath of the Battle of Normandy, the now-100-year-old finally received a long-overdue purple heart medal from the U.S. Army. NBC New York's Adam Kuperstein reports.

Heffernan’s remains were flown from Honolulu on Tuesday, received by full military honor guard and an escort back to Bergen County. His funeral mass will finally happen Saturday morning at St. Elizabeth Catholic Church in Wykoff. He will be buried with full military honors in Queens next to his siblings, his dad and the mother who never stopped hoping he would return home.

Reuniting them made the most appropriate sense to McVeigh.

"I just feel this incredible sense of responsibility to do this right," he said.

His only regret: That his mother, Heffernan's sister, isn't alive to see it all finally happen.

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