David Walker, 19 and from Portsmouth, died during the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941 on board the USS California. His body was finally laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery this week.
His cousin Cheryle Stone was born 12 years after Walker died but she provided the DNA sample Defense Department researchers used to confirm his identity.
“I've heard of all the guys that died there, but what you don't hear are the African American stories,” she said. “He was a mess attendant - wash dishes, serve food, take out the trash.”
Walker went to I.C. Norcom High School before dropping out to join the military a year before his death. He entered the Navy at a time when most African Americans were relegated to being messman, trained mainly to attend to the officers on board ships. As part of the segregated Navy, most Black sailors were trained at a school located on Naval Base Norfolk.
On December 7, 1941, Walker was on the USS California when it was struck by two Japanese torpedoes and a bomb during the attack, which killed more than 100 sailors and Marines. His body was recovered but never identified.
In 2018, 25 bodies of the unknown dead from the USS California were exhumed from a Navy cemetery in Hawaii, dubbed the Punchbowl, to try to identify them using modern DNA testing.
The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency located Stone and a few other of Walker’s distant relatives.
Stone was raised in foster care after her mother died when she was five years old.
“So this part of the discovery was very exciting to me, because now I have a connection with my mother's family,” she said.
Stone was given a copy of a letter Walker’s mother, Edna Lee Ward, sent to the Navy after his death, asking what happened to him. He would be listed as missing in action before being declared dead.
Ward was also featured in a newspaper article from the time, asking a reporter to put her son’s picture in the paper
Ward is Stone’s great aunt, who she also never met.
“When I read the letter, I did everything but cry, because that hurt my heart that she's still looking for her boy,” Stone said.
At the gravesite at Arlington National Cemetery, Stone said she read a letter the family wrote to her great aunt.
“She can finally rest easy now. Her boy has finally come home,” she said.
