A 73-year-old mystery over a missing soldier reaches haunting end at NC cemetery

Joe Marusak
·4 min read
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At 2 p.m. Friday, the uncle Jatonna Hunt Garner never knew will be buried with full military honors at Salisbury National Cemetery.

The ceremony for Army Corporal Rex Powell of Valdese will finally provide closure to a mystery that has haunted Garner’s family for 73 years, the Thomasville mother of two told The Charlotte Observer on Saturday.

Two weeks before Christmas in 1950, during the Korean War, her uncle was reported missing when his unit was attacked. The Army issued a “presumptive finding of death” in 1953 but Powell’s remains were never located. Until now.

Early this year, the 61-year-old Garner received a call from a military forensics investigator that shocked her. Powell’s remains finally had been identified.

A rainbow appears over the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. The remains of Army Corporal Rex Powell of Valdese NC were identified after being disinterred from the cemetery and analyzed at a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab.
A rainbow appears over the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu, Hawaii. The remains of Army Corporal Rex Powell of Valdese NC were identified after being disinterred from the cemetery and analyzed at a Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency lab.

A grandmother’s hope

Powell was from small-town Valdese in Burke County, about 70 minutes northwest of Charlotte.

He was underage, probably 17, when he asked his mother to sign his papers at a local Army recruiting office. She refused.

But Garner’s great-uncle went along with the request and signed Powell’s papers. Her grandmother never again spoke again to the great-uncle.

Just three months after Powell enlisted, enemy forces attacked his unit near the Chosin Reservoir in North Korea. He was reported missing in action on Dec. 12, 1950, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency in Fort Knox, Kentucky. Powell was 18.

This newspaper clipping from the 1950s lists Rex Powell as Missing in Action.
This newspaper clipping from the 1950s lists Rex Powell as Missing in Action.

Then in December 1953, the Army issued a “presumptive finding of death” for Powell.

But his mother, Isa Powell Williams Epley, held out hope until the day she died in the late 1980s that Powell might still be alive somehow.

Maybe he was taken as a prisoner of war and decided after he was freed to live in Korea, Garner said her grandmother thought.

A ‘wandering spirit’

Garner knows little about her uncle.

“He was 17,” she said. “Did he graduate high school? Did he finish school?”

The answers remain a mystery.

Her grandmother and other family members never talked about Powell or what might have happened to him.

Garner knew only one story about him from her mother, Barbara Hunt, who died last year.

Hunt was a girl when Powell, about 10 years her senior, went off to war. She fondly recalled how Powell “was always kind to her,” Garner said. “She had a little red wagon, and he would pull the wagon with her in it.”

Powell was a “wandering spirit,” according to Garner’s mother.

He didn’t know what he wanted to do in life before he coaxed his relative to sign him up for the military, Garner said.

Identifying soldier’s remains

Powell was a member of L Company, 3rd Battalion, 31st Infantry Regiment, 7th Infantry Division, according to the accounting agency.

“While it is possible Powell was captured, there was no record or eyewitness accounts of him being held as a prisoner of war, and no recovered remains were ever identified as him,” officials said in a July news release.

In 1954, the year after the Army issued its “presumptive finding of death” for Powell, the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea returned the remains of more than 2,900 Americans. None were identified as Powell, and he was declared “non-recoverable” in January 1956, according to the accounting agency.

This newspaper clipping from the 1950s lists Army Corporal Rex Powell of Valdese as presumed dead.
This newspaper clipping from the 1950s lists Army Corporal Rex Powell of Valdese as presumed dead.

Powell’s were among 848 unidentified remains later buried at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl, in Honolulu.

But as the science of DNA identification of human remains improved over the years, the Army began a project of disinterring remains from the Punchbowl.

In March 2021, Powell’s still unidentified remains were disinterred and transferred for analysis to the accounting agency lab at Joint Base Pearl Harbor-Hickam, Hawaii.

The agency accounted for Powell on Feb. 13 of this year, after his remains were identified through dental, anthropological and mitochondrial DNA analysis, officials said.

His name is recorded on a stone outdoor monument called the Courts of the Missing at the Punchbowl, with others still missing from the Korean War, agency officials said.

A rosette, or special marker, will be placed beside Powell’s name to show he has been accounted for. At least 7,500 other Americans still remain unaccounted for from the Korean War, according to the agency.

Powell also is survived by his nephew, Warren Hunt and his wife, Wendy; and two great-nieces, Devon Gailey and Dylan Gailey.

His funeral will be at noon Friday at J.C. Green and Sons Funeral Home in Thomasville, with Chaplain Tom Barton officiating.

Local members of the national Rolling Thunder motorcycle club will lead the procession to the Salisbury cemetery, which sits 43 miles northeast of uptown Charlotte.

The ceremony will provide closure for Garner’s family after nearly three-quarters of a century.

“Finally,” Garner said, “he’s at home and at peace.”