Photo: Courtesy of Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency
SOMERVILLE, Mass. (WBZ NewsRadio) — The remains of a Somerville native killed in World War II have been identified nearly 80 years after his death.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency said in a press release the group accounted for the remains of U.S. Army Air Forces Staff Sgt. Loring E. Lord on Sept. 18, 2024. He died in March of 1945 after the A-26B "invader" aircraft he was serving on was shot down by anti-aircraft guns during a bombing mission to Dulmen, Germany.
After the war, U.S. officials interviewed residents in the area near Dulmen looking for reports of missing American soldiers. A local police officer told them he had seen a plane go down in the area and that the German military had secured the site and buried several airmen in a nearby cemetery. Some of those remains belonged to Lord's crewmates.
In 2014, a German researcher reached out to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency about a possible crash site connected to Lord's aircraft. In 2018, crews recovered the remains of one of Lord's crewmates and other remains. They were taken back to a lab, where they were identified as Lord's remains through anthropological analysis, circumstantial evidence, and genome analysis.
Lord will now be buried in Everett at a later date. His name on the Tablets of the Missing at Henri-Chapelle American Cemetery will now have a rosette next to his name, a sign that he has now been accounted for.
