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SALT LAKE CITY -- The U.S. Department of Defense announced Tuesday that it has identified the remains of a Utah Airman killed in Vietnam.
Maj. Russell C. Goodman died in 1967 in an air strike. Forty-two years later, his family will have some closure, and other missing-in-action families will have renewed hope.
On February 20, 1967, Goodman and a lieutenant were struck by enemy antiaircraft fire, and their plane exploded. The lieutenant was able to eject, but Goodman did not escape. His remains were buried until now.
"When we first heard from the national league of families that they think they found Mr. Goodman, we were all ecstatic," says Bill Roop, spokesman for the POW MIA Awareness Organization of Utah.
Roop's organization hopes for news like this. They say 15 Utah soldiers are still missing from the Vietnam War.
"There's so many of them still missing, but when one comes home it's a movement towards what we're looking for," says the organization's executive director, Kurt Falkner.
A joint U.S.-Vietnamese team investigated Goodman's crash site twice from 1993 to 2008, finding human remains and aircraft debris. They were finally able to use forensic tool and mitochondrial DNA to match two of Goodman's maternal relatives.
"Families are looking ahead and saying, ‘Well, one day it's going to happen.' And they're not giving up hope," Falkner says.
One such family could be the Ellisons. Pilot John C. Ellison was also killed in 1967. His brother, Ted Ellison, says several excavations of the crash site have turned up nothing.
"I think, as a family, obviously we would have liked to have closure, but it's something that happened a long time ago," Ted Ellison says.
He continues to hope for other families and was happy to hear about Goodman.
"When a family member doesn't come home from a theatre of war, it's tough to deal with. It's tough," Ted Ellison says.
KSL News contacted the Goodman family in California, but we did not hear back from them.
Goodman will be honored this week at Nellis Airforce Base in Nevada, because at the time of his death he was assigned to the Thunderbirds. His remains will be buried in Alaska.
E-mail: ngonzles@ksl.com
