The remains of a 22-year-old Ohio soldier killed during World War II were laid to rest Friday in Phoenix.
William Lowell Groh Junior is now buried above his mother, next to his father at Greenwood Memory Lawn Cemetery.
When he went missing in action almost 80 years ago, Groh was fighting in the Hürtgen Forest along the German-Belgian border.
A rosette next to his name on the Tablets of the Missing in Belgium now signifies that he has been accounted for.
“We knew he was a soldier,” Mears said of her and her sister growing up. “We knew he was MIA. So we always kind of fantasized that he had amnesia and he was over in Germany. He married a German girl and had, like, a dozen kids, lived on a farm, and he was very happy.”
While nobody present for his burial knew him in life, Mears remembers listening to a recording of his music.
“I had his record and I was playing my Uncle Bill, playing the trombone,” Mears recalled, describing a time when she was around 8 years old. “And my mother was standing in the doorway and she was just sobbing.”
In 2021, Groh's remains were identified through a DNA match after being exhumed from a Belgian cemetery years earlier.
Other family members present expressed that it’s a relief having Groh back in Arizona, where many were born and raised, and where his parents had waited decades to reunite with him.
