Body of Airman Found in Sierra Glacier Identified

After four months of painstaking work, government scientists have identified a lost Army airman whose remains were locked in a Sierra Nevada mountain glacier for 63 years.

The man, identified as Leo A. Mustonen of Brainerd, Minn., died at 22 when a training flight from Sacramento crashed on remote Mt. Mendel in Kings Canyon National Park. Three other airmen also died in the crash.

Mustonen’s relatives, who said they were notified by a military official, were happy the identification had finally been made.

“It’s wonderful to have this closure,” said Mustonen’s niece, Leane Ross, a real estate developer in Jacksonville, Fla. “We’re so grateful for all the time and effort the government expended on our behalf.”

Ross said her uncle’s remains would be cremated.

After a military funeral, he will be buried beside his parents at Evergreen Cemetery in Brainerd. No date for the ceremony has yet been set.

“We’ve learned to love him,” said Ross, who was born after her uncle’s death. “He’s become a member of the family.”

Mustonen’s training flight from an Army air base in Sacramento disappeared Nov. 18, 1942. Scattered wreckage and unidentifiable remains were discovered on Mt. Mendel five years later, but it was not until last October that climbers found a body in the ice not far from the crash site.

Still encased in ice, the remains were flown to the Fresno County coroner’s office and then to the federal lab in Hawaii responsible for identifying all missing U.S. service personnel.

Run by the Joint POW-MIA Accounting Command, the lab at Hickam Air Force Base has more forensic anthropologists on staff than any other agency in the world, according to officials.

To identify the airman, scientists studied the 61 pounds of remains. They examined clothing tattered by weather and time, an unopened silk parachute, a comb with several teeth missing, an address book with congealed pages, an illegible ID badge and a pocketful of change.

DNA samples were taken from relatives of the four World War II airmen and compared with DNA from the remains.

Most of Mustonen’s direct relatives have left Brainerd, an old railroad town in a region dotted with lakes and thick with Paul Bunyan lore.

But residents such as Marjorie Freeman, a schoolmate of Mustonen and a family friend, still remember him well. “He was very nice, very quiet -- a typical Finn,” she said in an interview last fall. “He didn’t flaunt himself or anything like that.”

A studious boy, he wanted to fly or design airplanes, she said.

Freeman, then the young wife of a serviceman, moved in with her mother-in-law, next door to Mustonen’s parents, during the war.

After her son disappeared, Anna Mustonen would come over for coffee every day. “She’d break into tears and my mother-in-law would reach across the table and hold her hand,” Freeman recalled.

Anna and her husband, Arvo, flew to California for a ceremony at the veterans cemetery in San Bruno, Calif., in 1947. The remains discovered in the Sierra that year were buried in a grave topped with a stone memorial to all four airmen.

Anna Mustonen remained tormented by her son’s disappearance until her death in 1968, Freeman said.

Following military custom, Mustonen’s relatives will be officially informed of the airman’s death by Army officers who are to call on them at their Florida home this week.

They also will be presented with a thick file detailing the tests and observations that led to the lab’s findings.

For relatives of the other airmen -- cadet Ernest Glen Munn, cadet John M. Mortenson and 2nd Lt. William R. Gamber -- the news has dimmed their hopes.

In Pittsburgh, Lois Shriver, Munn’s sister, said she had felt in her heart that the body found in the glacier wasn’t her brother’s.

She knew the remains were said to be of a man about 5 feet 9 or 6 feet tall. Her brother was 6 feet 4 and didn’t have the spaces between his teeth that the found body did.

Shriver said she wishes the best for Mustonen’s family.

“I’m very happy for them,” she said, “but I’m very disappointed too.”