Memorial

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1st Lt Raymond Pascual graduated from Bay Shore High School and attended the State Institute of Applied Agriculture in Farmingdale for two years.

He enlisted at Fort Niagara, Youngstown, New York on 16 March 1942,

He died just months before his wife gave birth to their only child, Raymond Pascual Jr. A few photographs and stories told by his mother and grandmother are all he knows of his father.

On the way back from the mission, the Luftwaffe caught the Group without any fighter protection. The 492nd lost a dozen of their planes.

The initial MIA report thought the crew might had gone down in the Baltic Sea. Later reports suspected they had gone down in the North Sea. Almost sixty years later the wreckage was discovered near the initial battle zone.

The excavated remains of the crew were sent to Hawaii for DNA identification. Evereyone in the crew was positively identified except for S/Sgt Cotey. However, his ring and dogtags were found in the wreckage and forensics were able to conclude his remains are among the parts from which DNA could not be extracted.

Leonard Ray was buried in Maryland on 5 October 2007. Robert Flood was buried in Pennsylvania on the following day. Hyman Stiglitz was buried on 28 December 2007 in Tucson, Arizona. The other four identified through DNA were buried at Arlington on 12 June 2008 along with a mass burial for the entire crew which contains all of the remains that could not be identified.