Chicago Navy sailor killed at Pearl Harbor will be buried with honors

Two Illinois men were killed at Pearl Harbor and deemed "non-recoverable" four years after World War II ended. More than 80 years later, their remains have been identified and they’re being given a final resting place.

Seaman 2nd Class Michael Malek wasn’t accounted for until February 2021, according to the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, a U.S. Department of Defense division that works to identify missing soldiers. Malek was 17 when he was killed aboard the USS Oklahoma during the Dec. 7, 1941, attack Pearl Harbor.

Now, Malek's niece Sandra Hannan and her husband plan to attend Malek's service at the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific in Honolulu on June 6. They’ll be joined by her youngest son and Malek’s namesake, Michael.

"I never knew Michael [Malek], so I can’t say I missed him. But to have the story completed for our family, there’s a good sense of closure," Hannan said. Her son Michael "will be able to pass it on to the next generation, and it will remain a story that is part of the history of our family."

In the early 2000s, the predecessors of the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency exhumed a casket believed to contain the remains of five individuals.

They found the remains of more than 100, according to Ashley Wright, a spokesperson for the agency. That discovery launched a larger project.

Between June and September 2015, officials exhumed bodies from the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific, also known as the Punchbowl, that were associated with the Oklahoma. They've since been working with scientists to identify the bodies using dental, anthropological and DNA analysis. Malek's was among them.

Hannan said she was first contacted nearly two years ago. Although they couldn’t confirm Malek's identity using her DNA, they eventually did so after finding a relative in Europe.

Malek had been born to Czech parents who came to the U.S. in search of opportunity. Once they found it, they brought his older brother over to join them, Hannan said. Malek stayed up late at night whispering with his brother to teach him English as he adapted to life in a new country.

Once the war began, Malek rushed to sign up for the Navy. After his death, his older brother also enlisted, becoming a paratrooper in the Pacific and paving his way to citizenship.

Malek had been assigned to the USS Oklahoma, which was commissioned in 1916 and protected convoys in European waters before the end of World War I, and later accompanied President Woodrow Wilson on trips to France. The ship was modernized a decade later and moved to the West Coast in 1936 before being stationed at Pearl Harbor in 1940.

In the attack, the side of the ship was struck by aerial torpedoes and its port side blown open. More than 400 service members were killed, many of whom were trapped in the ship's hull.

The Oklahoma was salvaged for weapons and parts two years later, and eventually sold for scrap in 1947, but it sank again while being towed from Hawaii to California. By then, only 35 of the dead had been identified after the military disinterred remains from graves across the Pacific.

In October 1949, a military board designated those who couldn’t be identified as non-recoverable and buried the remains across 46 plots in the National Memorial Cemetery of the Pacific — including Malek.

In the decades that followed, all Hannan’s family had to remember her uncle were her father’s stories and Malek’s posthumous Purple Heart.

"It’s nice to have those little details filled out," Hannan said. "Some people don’t have this type of closure. You have to feel sorry that they don’t … There’s no more doubt."

The Oklahoma identification project wrapped up in 2021, having identified 362 of the nearly 400 missing from the viable DNA samples of more than 5,000 bones — less than half of the 13,000 total exhumed.

Fire Controlman 3rd Class William Gusie, a Glen Ellyn native who was also aboard the Oklahoma when it sank, was identified in September 2021. He was 19 when he was killed.

Gusie will be buried in a private ceremony June 12 in Minneapolis with full military honors.

Gusie’s family declined to speak with the Sun-Times through a military representative.

With 81,000 service members still missing, the team of 700 at the Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency is continuing to work to identify more of them.

Wright says she still remembers the first funeral she attended connected to the work: a Vietnam veteran who was laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery more than 50 years after he died. His sister laid her hand on his casket before it was lowered into the ground.

“We would think the grieving process would be over, but it’s not,” Wright said. “You just knew there was a void. It’s generational grieving … It’s seeing that chapter close for that family. They’re finally home.”