A Southern Arizona soldier killed during the Korean War 72 years ago will be laid to rest in Tucson next month.
Army Pvt. Felix M. Yanez of Douglas, Arizona, will be buried in Tucson at South Lawn Cemetery on Sept. 3. Yanez, then 19 years old, was killed July 16, 1950, while fighting the North Korean People’s Army along the Kum River, north of Taejon, South Korea.
However, the ongoing battle prevented his body from being recovered at the time, a U.S. Army news release said. Less than a year later in March 1951, a set of unknown remains were recovered near the village of Tuman-ni, South Korea, along the main road that the 19th Infantry Regiment had used to withdraw.
The remains were designated X-789 Tanggok, and buried in the United Nations Cemetery Tanggok, the news release said.
In August 1951, the Central Identification Unit Kokura in Japan began a reexamination of X-789. After declaring the remains unidentifiable, all 848 unidentified sets of Korean War remains at CIU-Kokura were sent to Hawaii in 1956 and buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.
Sixty-eight years later, in August 2019, the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency disinterred X-789 and sent the remains to a laboratory for analysis.
Yanez was accounted for this year on July 13, after his remains were identified using circumstantial evidence, chest radiograph comparison, and dental, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis, the news release said.
Yanez was a member of Headquarters Company, 1st Battalion, 19th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division.
His name was recorded on the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, along with the others who are still missing from the Korean War. A rosette will now be placed next to his name to indicate he has been accounted for.
More than 7,500 Americans remain unaccounted for from the Korean War, the news release said.
