Eighty years after he was killed in the attack on Pearl Harbor, Signalman Third Class Austin Hesler was laid to rest in Arizona on Friday.
Hesler joined the Navy in 1939 and was assigned to the USS Oklahoma. The ship was torpedoed at the onset of the Pearl Harbor attack, and Hesler was one of 429 crewmen who died when the ship capsized.
After the ship was recovered in 1944, bodies could not be identified and were buried in several mass graves in Honolulu, marked "Unknown.”
The Department of Defense began to reexamine the remains in 2015, with advanced DNA testing. Hesler’s remains were identified earlier this year.
Hesler was born in Kansas, but his closest living relative lives in Arizona. He is buried in the Southern Arizona Veterans’ Memorial Cemetery.
