Lawrence Earl Garrison was killed in November 1943 in the central Pacific. His remains were unidentified until DNA testing allowed his family to lay him to rest.
A program for the service of Marine Pfc. Lawrence Earl Garrison, who was killed during the Battle of Tarawa during World War II. His remains were buried at Arlington National Cemetery on Thursday. On Lawrence Earl Garrison’s first day of battle in November 1943, he joined nearly 35,000 Marines on the atoll of Tarawa in an attempt to seize the Japanese-held Gilbert Islands in the central Pacific.Two years earlier, the United States had been drawn into World War II after Japan bombed Pearl Harbor.
Over those decades, his family members — many of whom hadn’t ever met Garrison, said Dwayne Taylor, 76, Garrison’s nephew — had done what they could to learn about how Garrison might be identified. There wasn’t much to be done, said Cheryl Cronin, 66, Garrison’s niece. After all, “forensic science was at its infancy” for much of that time, Cronin said.
from World War II, according to data from Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency , a federal agency that tracks down missing defense personnel.Then, in 2009, the DPAA, History Flight and the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System, a scientific lab that identifies missing in action service members, partnered to exhume and identify Tarawa troops.
Sequencing uses an individual’s DNA sample to generate a corresponding genetic code, which can then be overlaid with another individual’s sequence to see whether they are related. “Mitochondrial DNA-based sequencing technologies are becoming much more common,” said Thomas Clements, a biology lecturer at Vanderbilt University.
Mitochondrial DNA sequencing lays the groundwork for genetic identification, said Timothy McMahon, director of Defense Department DNA operations at the Armed Forces Medical Examiner System. To zero in on a potential match, the system used Y chromosome testing — from another relative’s sample — to track Garrison’s father’s lineage, McMahon said.
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