Remains of 19-year-old Arizona soldier killed in Korean War to be buried

TUCSON, Ariz. (AP) — The remains of a 19-year-old Arizona soldier who was killed in action during the Korean War in 1950 will be buried next month in Tucson, U.S. Army officials said Monday.

Burial for Pvt. Felix M. Yanez is scheduled for Sept. 3 at South Lawn Cemetery.

Yanez was a native of Douglas, Arizona who served in the Army as a member of Headquarters and Headquarters Company, 19th Infantry Regiment, 24th Infantry Division.

Army officials said he died on July 16, 1950 while fighting the North Korean People’s Army along the Kum River north of Taejon, South Korea.

Yanez’s body could not be recovered at that time.

A set of remains recovered in March 1951 that couldn’t be identified were buried in the United Nations Cemetery Tanggok.

Five years later, all 848 unidentified sets of Korean War remains at the Central Identification Unit Kokura in Japan were sent to Hawaii and buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu.

But in 2019, the Defense Department’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency had some of the unidentified remains disinterred and sent to a laboratory at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam in Hawaii.

Army officials said Yanez’s remains finally were identified last month through dental and DNA analysis.

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