GLOUSTER — Nearly 82 years after his bomber broke apart over Europe, Sgt. Myron Lee Yaw is home. The Athens County airman was laid to rest Oct. 3 at Maplewood Cemetery in Glouster, beside his parents and two sisters, one day before what would have been his 102nd birthday, The Columbus Dispatch reported.
“Finally, he’s home,” his niece, Suzie Lewis, told The Columbus Dispatch. Myron was 20 years old, a ball turret gunner aboard a B-24J Liberator, when anti-aircraft fire struck the bomber on Dec. 26, 1944, during a mission against an oil refinery at Blechhammer, then part of Germany. The aircraft broke in two and crashed near Korzonek, in present-day Poland, and all nine crew members were killed, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency (DPAA), whose work The Dispatch detailed.
It was the Yaw family’s second loss that year. Myron’s older brother, Sgt. John Milton Yaw, also a ball turret gunner, had been killed when his aircraft was shot down near Ploesti, Romania, in July 1944, The Dispatch reported. For decades Myron’s name stayed on the rolls of the missing at the Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery in Belgium, while his family in Ohio kept his photographs and passed down his story.
The identification took years of fieldwork. A DPAA team surveyed the crash site in 2018, and excavations by a partner organization between 2021 and 2025 recovered human remains and other evidence that went to the agency’s laboratory, The Dispatch reported. Scientists identified Myron’s remains in June from skull fragments, using recovery location and DNA comparisons — including a sample from a niece who submitted DNA before she died. Carrie Brown, a forensic anthropologist and laboratory manager at the DPAA’s Nebraska facility, confirmed the identification details to The Dispatch and said the agency made 250 identifications in the fiscal year ending Sept. 30, its highest annual total.
More than 80,000 American service members remain unaccounted for from World War II through the Gulf Wars, according to the DPAA figures cited by The Dispatch, and Brown encouraged relatives of the missing to contact their service casualty office through the DPAA website about providing a DNA sample. In Myron’s case, newer testing methods let a broader range of relatives help than the maternal-line samples scientists once relied on, The Dispatch reported.
Before the war, Myron had attended Ohio University and hoped to marry his fiancée and have children, his nephew John “Butch” Spencer Rutter Lee told The Dispatch. When the remains came home in September, people lined the route from Columbus to Athens County to watch and honor him, and veterans, relatives and neighbors filled the funeral at Jagers & Sons Funeral Home in Athens, where the Rev. Chris Yaw, a relative, led the service. “The family is still here. The name is still here. And today, Myron is here,” he said, according to The Dispatch.
Lee, now 83 and the last surviving family member who met his uncle, told The Dispatch he comes to Maplewood each spring to clean the family’s headstones. Next spring, he said, he will clean his uncle’s headstone too. At the crash site in Poland, The Dispatch reported, the search continues for the rest of the crew — but for one Athens County family, an 82-year wait ended the week before Veterans Day.