Family bringing Leo Mustonen home
More than 60 years after his death on a California mountainside, Leo Mustonen will return home to Brainerd.
Family members plan to bury the 22-year-old Brainerd High School graduate's remains with his parents in Evergreen Cemetery. It has been an unexpected journey for Leo's relatives, two nieces and a sister-in-law, who live in Florida. But not one without joy.
"I think it's absolutely wonderful," said Leane Mustonen Ross, Leo's niece in Jacksonville, Fla. "I would have been just as happy for those other families to have this closure. I know the anxiety. We are so happy to be bringing him home to Brainerd."
Plans are for a full military escort to Brainerd with services at First Lutheran Church and then interment for the cremated remains with Anna Mustonen, Leo's mother.
Ross said her father's brother was mentioned in the family, but not really discussed. When climbers discovered his body, mostly encased in ice, at the bottom of a glacier in the Sierra Nevada mountain range last October, everything changed.
"Now he is very much a part of our family," Ross said. "He is loved very much and we really feel we've regained a family member. The (memorial) service is really going to be a celebration of life. It's pretty amazing, through his death what a wonderful gift he's given us. He's a real person now. He's part of us and part of our history and our lives and that's why it's so thrilling."
Ross first learned about the World War II-era airman found on the mountainside when she saw television images of forensic scientists working to free him from the ice. She found the story interesting, but wouldn't suspect how close it would become to her until days later.
Once Ross learned her missing uncle was on a short list of 10 possible matches to the recovered airman, she was convinced this day would come.
"I knew it was Leo," Ross said. "In my heart, I knew it was."
Ross' sister, Ona Lea Mustonen, said the journey has been one of discovery for her and a chance for her nearly 86-year-old mother to reminisce.
Mountain mystery
Leo Mustonen, 22, Brainerd, was one of three aviation cadets and a pilot, all in their 20s, on a routine flight in an AT-7 navigational training plane that left Mather Field in Sacramento on Nov. 18, 1942, and disappeared.
The plane crashed far off course in California's Sierra Nevada mountain range in the remote back country of Kings Canyon National Park.
Parts of wreckage were discovered by climbers on a steep glacier above Evolution Valley in 1947. Dangerous conditions along with scattered and buried debris had the search team conclude further investigation was inadvisable.
In October 2005, climbers found an airman's head and arm jutting out of solid ice in the Mendel glacier. Forensic experts and military body recovery specialists worked to melt a 400-pound block of ice and granite that encased the body.
Source: Associated Press.
"I was born the same year that he died," Mustonen said of her uncle Leo. "The most we ever knew was that his plane went down in 1942."
Mustonen said now she has many more details about her uncle's life. "It's been filled with joy," she said of the experience. "It's been filled with sadness also."
She learned her uncle told her mother he wanted to have a family and children of his own like Ona Lea.
"He was never able to achieve that and I guess that's made it very personal for me," she said, from her rural Jacksonville home. "It's been able to be a time of closure and deepening of our family roots and almost a personal encounter with my uncle even though he's deceased. And certainly nice to know he won't be left alone up in the mountains in a pile of snow. It's good to give him a decent burial."
Ross said she's done a lot of research about Leo recently. She learned her uncle was fastidious and ambitious. He was a bright, hard worker and a good student with goals for the future. He was a nice, polite young man who was well mannered and well thought of. He was a debate team member. And in the fall of 1942, he was a navigator cadet planning to join the war effort.
"He wanted to design aircraft," Ross said.
Ross said the discovery has made her wonder - why now after all these years? And Ross believes there is always a reason for something to happen. An answer may be in the attention from local and national media and general public interest. Ross said the bigger picture may be the renewed interest in recovering the missing.
"I'm just feeling like it's going to help an awful lot of people, not just us," Ross said.
The National Park Service is considering whether to launch a new search in the spring for the other members of Mustonen's flight. A headstone at Golden Gate National Cemetery in San Bruno, California remembers the flight crew - pilot Lt. William Gamber, 23, Fayette, Ohio; aviation cadets, Ernest Munn, 23, St. Clairsville, Ohio; John Mortenson, 25, Moscow, Idaho; and Mustonen.
The Joint POW/MIA Accounting Command in Honolulu, the world's largest forensic lab, worked to confirm the airman's identity. Family members provided DNA for the investigation. With the remains, scientists found a corroded nameplate, clothing remnants, a broken plastic comb, dimes dating between 1936 and 1942, an Army Air Corps insignia on his uniform and three small leather-bound address books. Forensic experts believe Leo Mustonen, who was found intact wearing a parachute, died in the plane crash.
"The injuries were so substantial, he didn't feel anything. He died immediately," said Dr. Robert Mann, a forensic anthropologist, CNN reported.
Once her uncle was identified, Ross said the family had a choice of Arlington National Cemetery or anywhere else for a burial site.
As a mother herself, Ross said there was never any question of what to do. She understood her grandmother's anguish at the loss of a child and the unanswered questions his death left for the family. The date for a service in Brainerd has not been determined yet. But the anticipated result will finally unite a family torn apart by a world at war six decades after they first feared such a reunion would never come to pass.
RENEE RICHARDSON can be reached at renee.richardson@brainerddispatch.com or 855-5852.