The remains of an Arlington Heights High School graduate killed in Laos during the early part of the Vietnam War returned to Texas on Thursday.
Navy Lt. Cmdr. William Patrick Egan, who was 35 when he was killed during a bombing run April 29, 1966, will be buried with full military honors Saturday in Webster, outside Houston."It's sad, but also a joyous occasion," said his daughter, Jerryl Wismer, who was 7 when he died. "He's home. It's a remarkable thing to us. He deserves to be buried on American soil."The repatriation of his remains was made possible by a Laotian farmer who discovered bone fragments in his field in 2009 and turned them over to U.S. authorities, who then used DNA to link them to Lt. Cmdr. Egan's niece.Teams of officials with the Joint Prisoners of War, Missing in Action Accounting Command in Hawaii and the Laotian government had previously discovered aircraft wreckage and crew-related equipment at the site in Khammouan province, but had never found human remains.Coincidentally, the Laotian farmer turned over the remains on Dec. 22, 2009, the birthday of Lt. Cmdr. Egan's youngest daughter, Janet Frisard, and Lt. Cmdr. Egan was positively identified on March 5, 2010, Wismer's birthday."Those dates are interesting," Wismer said. "We thought he must have been sending us a message."Lt. Cmdr. Egan was born and spent his boyhood in Denton, Wismer said. His family moved to Thomas Place in the Arlington Heights neighborhood when his father took a banking job in Fort Worth.He graduated from Arlington Heights in 1949, his daughter said.He graduated from Austin College in Sherman and joined the Navy, earning his aviator wings in Pensacola, Fla., shortly afterward and then eloping with a woman he had met at a Catholic school."He swept her off her feet," Wismer said of her mother, Anne Egan. "He was the love of her life. She kept his memory alive for us all these years."Lt. Cmdr. Egan earned a master's degree in aeronautical engineering at the Naval Postgraduate School in California and completed astronaut training at NASA in Houston in the early 1960s, sharing a room with Gene Cernan, his daughter said. But he wasn't selected to be an astronaut, and he returned to the fleet.On the day he died, Lt. Cmdr. Egan and another pilot launched their A-1 Skyraiders off the aircraft carrier USS Hancock to attack a supply depot on the Ho Chi Minh Trail west of the North Vietnamese port of Dong Hoi, according to information from Vietnam-related websites.After rolling in on the target and dropping his weapons, Egan's plane was struck by ground fire and went straight into the ground, the government said."His wingman observed the crash and immediately flew over the area but saw no sign of life," the government release says.In 2004, shortly before what would have been Lt. Cmdr. Egan's 73rd birthday, a group of former classmates at Arlington Heights wrote a message to him on the Virtual Wall website, thanking him for his "devotion and duty to country.""On your birthday all of these people will say a special prayer for you," the message read. "Your friends in God's kingdom will find out how much you are missed and loved by all of your Texas friends."Chris Vaughn, 817-390-7547Have more to add? News tip? Tell us
