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A ship's bell tolled for each of 16 veterans Monday at a funeral service at Utah Veterans Memorial Park, where their previously unclaimed cremated ashes were buried with full military honors.

Only one of the service members honored had family present — and they didn't know he had died until the Missing in America Project inventoried a Salt Lake City funeral home's storage closet.

The ceremony was the first such funeral in Utah organized by the Missing in America Project, a volunteer group whose leaders expect to similarly honor hundreds of thousands more veterans whose remains weren't claimed when they died.

A funeral procession that included 80 motorcyclists flying American flags and was accompanied by police stretched about a half-mile along Interstate 15 on the way from Deseret Mortuary, which arranged the funeral, to the Camp Williams military cemetery.

Military personnel carried each of the urns into the Veterans Memorial Park chapel, where about 150 people stood in for family and friends to pay final tribute to the 15 men and one woman who served in the 1940s, '50s, '60s and '70s and died here.

The cremation urns were set on a table. Military men in full dress uniform unfolded and re-folded each of 16 American flags; outside, a bugler played "Taps" and riflemen fired a 21-gun salute. There was no graveside service.

"It is because we are a grateful nation we are gathered here together," said Utah Army National Guard Brig. Gen. Michael Liechty during the chapel service. "May this be a hallowed place for these people, for their remains."

The ashes of one of the honored veterans, however, appeared headed for the mountains. The family of Ronald Harold Hester, who served in the U.S. Navy from 1970 to 1974 and died in 2009, received his flag and had a different ceremony in mind.

"He's going in the Manti-La Sal under a big quaking aspen that has his name carved in it," said Hester's younger brother Randall Hester, an Army veteran who attended the service with his wife, mother and brother.

Miriam Hester, Randall's mother and Ronald's stepmother, said she was shocked to hear of her son's planned funeral from a relative who read about it in The Salt Lake Tribune last week.

"My name's in the phone book," said the Kearns woman who brought up nine children in the Salt Lake Valley. "No one called."

She said she hadn't seen her stepson for about six years and acknowledged he'd been a lone wolf. Still, when she called her children to tell them Ronald's remains had been found, "every one of my kids said, 'Mom, this is bizarre.' "

Randall Hester said his brother was "a loner," but added that just because family members can't be found doesn't mean the unclaimed don't have anyone. "Every one of them people on that table has a family member that's alive."

Miriam Hester said she has asked the Missing in America Project to research what happened to her son Robert Hester, also a military veteran. She said she's been told he died in Illinois, but she doesn't know where his remains are.

Stories such as this have played out repeatedly since 2006, when Missing in America Project national director Fred Salanti was in Oregon and learned funeral homes regularly would drop off unclaimed cremated remains at cemeteries for burial without ceremony.

Salanti started his work in earnest after learning the Idaho State Veterans cemetery interred 21 remains of forgotten veterans, with full military honors, in November 2006. Since then, the Missing in America Project has arranged funerals for more than 1,000 unclaimed veterans across the country after volunteers searched genealogy and military records to bridge the gap between funeral homes, local authorities and the Department of Veterans Affairs.

"It wasn't a state problem," Salanti said. "It was a national problem."

Veterans may have job and family problems that cause them to withdraw and become isolated, Salanti said. But to see those souls buried without recognition "wasn't the right thing," he said. "That's why we're here today."

Roger Graves and his wife, Crystal, headed the new Utah effort after moving to Cedar City from Redding, Calif., where Salanti, a retired Army major, now lives.

Connor Griffith, of Deseret Mortuary, said the veterans' remains were cremated under Salt Lake County's legal authority when no one could be found to claim them. The urns have been stored at the mortuary, which helped volunteers research the identities of uncollected remains for evidence of military service. Missing in America Project

There are 54,000 funeral homes in the nation, according to Missing in America Project national director Fred Salanti. Volunteers with his group are researching more than 9,000 unclaimed remains now. Fifteen states have given them the authority to contact funeral homes for inventory. Salanti estimates that if they could get to every funeral home, they could help bury more than a quarter-million veterans.

A bill, H.R. 2051, the Veterans Missing in America Act of 2011, has been introduced in Congress and would direct the Secretary of Veterans Affairs to assist in the identification of unclaimed and abandoned human remains to determine if any such remains are eligible for burial in a national cemetery. —

Veterans honored

Deseret Mortuary released the names of veterans honored Monday. All but one were buried at the Utah Veterans Memorial Park in South Jordan. The remains of one man were claimed by family members after the service:

Eugene D'Andrea Jr. (1947-2011) • U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1967-1969

John Arthur Foreman (1935-2009) • U.S. Army, 1954-1957

Marita Anne Haberland (1951-2010) • U.S. Air Force, 1969

Ronald Harold Hester (1952-2009) • U.S. Navy, 1970-1974

Horace Raymond Hunt Jr. (1938-2008) • U.S. Army, 1958-1960

Charles Michael Karlsson (1940-2010) • U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1962–1965

John Robert Mooney (1941-2009) • U.S. Army, 1959-1962

Robert Lee Orchard (1930-2009) • U.S. Army, 1950-1953

Earl Day Owen (1925-2009) • U.S. Naval Reserve, 1943-1946

Stanley Benson Philoon (1949-2010) • U.S. Army, 1971-1974

Albert Franklin Pilon (1936-2010) • U.S. Air Force, 1954

Harlon James Plamp (1931-2010) • U.S. Army, 1950-1953

Billie Joe Porter (1947-2009) • U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1964-1965

Robert Moulton Southwick Jr. (1948-2010) • U.S. Marine Corps, 1966-1969; U.S. Air Force, 1972-1979

Timothy Nolan Theriot aka Anthony N. Theriot (1945-2009) • U.S. Army in Vietnam, 1965

Ronald Lee Young (1957-2010) • U.S. Marine Corps, 1976-1980