Submitted Photo Pictured is Staff Sergeant John H. Mann, a Stow Man killed in Pearl Harbor, recently identified thanks to an investigation by the Chief Rick Stone and Family Charitable Foundation.

Staff Sergeant John H. Mann, a Stow man killed during World War II at Pearl Harbor and the first Chautauqua County casualty in WWII, had his remains officially identified last week after many years of being an “Unknown” Missing in Action WWII casualty.

His identification was part of an investigation effort by the Chief Rick Stone and Family Charitable Foundation, who currently do work helping families investigate and identify the whereabouts of their Missing in Action and Prisoner of War family members.

Stone said his foundation dates back to 2002 and is a 501c3, which also provides educational grants to high school students. The work that the foundation does for MIA and POW cases is done through a system that Stone created during his time as a police chief in Dallas, the Random Incident Statistical Correlation System, or RISC.

Stone spent time in law enforcement in Hollywood, Wichita and Dallas. He began RISC while in Dallas as a police chief, as the original plan was to use it to help predictive policing and profiling, which he said would allow them to identify an area where a crime was likely to occur and what officers might be involved. The system also helped to identify bodies following a large airplane crash in Dallas, which Stone said had a large amount of bodies to be identified.

Essentially, Stone said what the system does is it takes basic biometric information and uses that to make predictions and matches to help identify remains, calling it an “early attempt at AI.” The system makes historical and biometric profiles on each of the unresolved casualties and compares it with historical and biometric profiles prepared for each of the unknowns.

When Stone retired from law enforcement he was given a position with the Department of Defense to help search for MIA and POW soldiers of WWII. Using his RISC system, Stone was tasked with looking into “unknowns” from WWII, of which he said there are around 8,000 world wide.

It was while he was assigned to look into those killed in Pearl Harbor that Stone made the discovery of the unknowns buried in Schofield Barracks Cemetery that served in the Army at Hickman Field, Hawaii.

“People think that all those killed in Pearl Harbor were in the Navy and on the ships,” Stone said. “I was assigned to look into those missing from the ships, and I kept finding clues that there were more than two cemeteries used to bury the casualties,” Stone said. “These clues led to the discovery of another cemetery. The Foundation focuses on helping families of those MIA soldiers find out what happened and we were originally overwhelmed with the casualties from the ships but we kept getting more clues that led us to the Schofield Barracks Cemetery.”

The Schofield Barracks Cemetery still exists today, and Stone said they learned a lot of interesting things from their research into this cemetery, including the existence of Army casualties from Pearl Harbor, not just those in the Navy on the ships. 14 soldiers from the Army that were labeled as unknowns were discovered to be buried there by Stone and his foundation.

Slowly and surely the research into these 14 casualties led them to the Punchbowl Cemetery, where Mann and the other unknowns were later taken to and buried, and once they had sufficient file numbers Stone said they were able to contact the Army about being able to match these unknowns to Army casualties from Pearl Harbor.

With their investigation and work, Stone said they know where these 14 unknowns are currently buried in Punchbowl Cemetery. Five of them have officially been identified by the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, including Mann, and nine are still left to be identified.

Besides Mann, those identified include; PVT Donald Edgar Bays, PFC Lee Irwin Clendenning, CPL Lester H. Libolt, and PVT Herbert Elton McLaughlin. The other nine are; PVT Frank G. Boswell, PFC John Edward Cruthirds, PFC James J. Gleason, PFC William Ernest Hasenfuss Jr., PFC Olaf A. Johnson, CPL Donald Francis Patrick Meagher, PFC Willard Carleton Orr, SSGT Walter J. Zuschlag, and PVT Hermann Kotzshmar Tibbetts Jr. SSGT Zuschlag and PFC Hasenfuss are also from New York, and remain among the missing. All 14 served in Hickam Field, Hawaii.

The cases of these MIA soldiers are important to Stone, he said, because even while he served in law enforcement he found it difficult to divorce himself from the victim of his investigations.

“It’s doubly troubling with these MIA cases because these kids gave everything and lost not only their lives but their names as well, including Mann before he was identified,” Stone said. “He is buried in a beautiful cemetery but his headstone only says ‘Unknown’. He lost not only his life but his name, and had no visitors to his grave because no one knew he was there. I was probably the first to visit Mann’s grave since he was buried there. The foundation and I are on a quest, you could say, to get them their names back.”

Mann is also a unique case, Stone said, in that he was only 22 years old and had served in the Army for two years, but had already risen to the rank of Staff Sergeant.

“In all of my experience investigating 790 cases, that is something I have never seen,” Stone said. “He advanced five promotions in two years, which tells me he was an exceptional young man. Who knows what he could’ve accomplished if he had not lost his life and his name at Pearl Harbor?”

There are many families out there that have never found out what happened to their MIA family members and loved ones, and Stone said the foundation works to help them find answers. People can contact them and they will assist them in finding their MIA family member, something Stone said the government does not do on an individual basis. They also do it at no cost to the family.

For more information on the Chief Rick Stone and Family Charitable Foundation, visit chiefrickstone.com.