Omaha family of long-lost WWII pilot hopes DNA evidence will bring closure

X post in GD. He was a gunner not a pilot.



POSTED: SUNDAY, AUGUST 30, 2015 12:00 AM
By Steve Liewer / World-Herald staff writer

Seventy-one years after Staff Sgt. Tom McCaslin’s B-26 bomber crashed in France, killing everyone on board, his family would be grateful if he could come home.

“I think everybody in the family would feel better,” said Dr. Joseph McCaslin, 84, of Omaha, Tom McCaslin’s brother.

For the first time, Tom McCaslin’s four surviving siblings — he was one of 13 children — now wonder if it could happen. Just a month ago, government officials asked Joe McCaslin for a sample of his DNA. They said it was routine — but the McCaslins are hoping.

The odds increased last fall when a British relic hunter named Mark Jurd found several finger bones and part of a scapula in a wooded area near Caen, France, where Tom McCaslin’s plane crashed on June 22, 1944. The crash occurred just a few weeks after D-Day, a few miles from Omaha Beach.

FULL story at link.