MIA Families Keep Searching

MyFox Washington DC - Washington, DC, USA

Last Edited: Saturday, 28 Mar 2009, 9:53 PM EDT
Created On: Saturday, 28 Mar 2009, 9:32 PM EDT

ROCKVILLE,Md. - Janice Stoms drove from Phoenixville, PA to Rockville, MD, Saturday, in an effort to find the father she lost in 1958. U.S. Army Captain Wayne Pitcher's plane went down at sea near Taiwan during the Cold War. Nobody knows whether it was mechanical trouble or an attack by Chinese pilots. Neither the aircraft nor the bodies of those aboard has ever been found.

Mrs. Stoms, who was eleven years old when her father disappeared, wants answers and wants the U.S. government to keep trying. "It would certainly help me," she sobbed, "To know what happened to my father so long ago."

Janice Stoms gave DNA samples from her mouth and from old envelopes possibly licked by her father to technicians who work for the Department of Defense's POW/MIA Office.

Should the aircraft and skeletal remains ever be found, the DNA evidence might confirm the identity of the person.

Mrs. Stoms was not alone on Saturday. About 150 family members gathered at a hotel in Rockville to hear a Defense Department briefing on worldwide efforts to gather and identify remains.

Although recovery operations have been shut down for several years in North Korea, they continue on the southern part of the peninsula. "We find two or three remains [in South Korea] annually," according to Ambassador Charles A. Ray, the current head of the DOD Missing Personnel Office.

Ambassador Ray says efforts continue to locate and identify remains from the estimated 1,700 military missing from the Vietnam War, the 8,000 MIA's from the Korean conflict, and the more than 70,000 American service personnel who were never accounted for at the end of World War II.