MIDDLETOWN — Strong breezes kept American flags waving Wednesday morning during a ceremony honoring three U.S. Army veterans from Connecticut whose remains had lingered unclaimed on funeral home shelves.
At the State Veterans Cemetery, white-gloved soldiers removed the cremated remains of PFC Mario N. DeVito, Private James Dickinson and SP5(T) Richard Robert Thurston from three hearses and placed them on a table with three folded flags.
U.S. Sen. Richard Blumenthal noted that not much was known about the three men or their service, but that did not matter. They had raised their right hands, swore allegiance to the U.S. Constitution and were willing to lay down their lives to preserve a free nation, Blumenthal said.
"That's all I need to know," he said.
This was the 10th such ceremony conducted by the state Department of Veterans Affairs and the Connecticut Funeral Directors Association. In 2008, then-state veterans Commissioner Linda Schwartz joined the funeral directors and the state chapter of the Missing in America Project to identify unclaimed veterans' remains. At the time, the Missing in America Project had helped locate, identify and inter ashes of more than 100 veterans nationwide.
Connecticut then set protocols in 2009 to identify unclaimed remains of honorably discharged veterans, with the goal of providing burials with full military honors. In 2019, for example, remains of four veterans — one from the Spanish American War, one from World War I and two from World War II — were buried at the state cemetery.
After confirming that remains belong to a veteran, funeral directors try to find relatives. No family members of the three soldiers honored Wednesday had come forward, and none, as far as organizers were aware, attended the ceremony.
Remains can go unclaimed for a variety of reasons —because relatives die or move out of state, or due to unfinished plans about final disposition of the remains, funeral directors Association President Lionel J. Lessard Jr. said.
Also, veterans officials said, discharge papers do not always contain details of where a veteran served, That was the case with the three soldiers honored Wednesday. DeVito was born in 1927 and served from 1945-47. He died in July 2000 in Bristol. Dickinson was born in 1917 and served from 1941-43. He died in March 1998 in West Haven. Born in 1943, Thurston served from 1964-67 and died in October 2022 in Simsbury, according to state veterans officials and the funeral directors group.
DeVito was born in New Britain and had lived in Bristol for 17 years before his death, according to an obituary in The Hartford Courant dated July 22, 2000. He had worked as a machine operator, retiring in 1993, and was survived by several relatives, including one child, the obit said.
Dickinson, who was awarded the National Defense Medal and the Eastern Defense Medal, was a factory worker who lived in Prospect; and Thurston worked as an electrician, according to Laura Soll, a spokesperson for the Funeral Directors Association.
Soll stressed that although some people pondering why veterans' remains go unclaimed may believe they died alone, that is not necessarily true. While the fact that no loved ones retrieved the veterans' ashes is "a difficult topic to reflect on," Middletown Mayor Benjamin Florsheim said, the purpose of the ceremony was to say, "We claim them."
Master of ceremonies John S. Carragher of the state veterans department, noted that remains of a Waterbury soldier who was killed along with his entire bomber crew in 1944 had remained unidentified for decades. Finally accounted for in 2023, U.S. Army Air Force Tech. Sgt. Kenneth J. McKeeman was buried in the State Veterans Cemetery on June 7 of this year.
No veteran, including McKeeman and three men who were honored Wednesday, is forgotten, Carragher said. After a gun salute, taps and a benediction, the remains of DeVito, Dickinson and Thurston were placed in a structure that holds urns called a columbarium.
State Veterans Commissioner Ron Welch said memorializing Connecticut's veterans is among the agency's core functions, and in many ways, the most important.
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