JACKSONVILLE, Fla. — Riverside Memorial Cemetery is a place marked by reverence — every headstone representing a service member who made the ultimate sacrifice.
For nearly six decades, the Tyner family carried a question no family should have to live with: Where was their son and brother, Army veteran Robert Tyner?
U.S. Army Pfc. Robert Tyner was just 20 years old when the Army helicopter carrying him crashed in Vietnam in February 1968.
His younger sister, Rebecca Tyner-Phillips, remembers him as a kindhearted young man who never met a stranger.
“He was just the most wonderful sweetheart you’d ever want to meet,” Tyner-Phillips said. “Never met a stranger, would give a stranger the shirt off of his back.”
For 58 years, the family waited for answers.
Those answers finally came when remains recovered from the crash site decades later were identified as Tyner’s.
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Tyner-Phillips said the family was contacted and told something they had spent a lifetime hoping to hear: her brother had been found.
The remains included a femur bone, which she said was determined to have a 99.9991% DNA match to her and her brother.
“He’s been missing for 58 years,” Tyner-Phillips said.
After nearly six decades of uncertainty, the family finally had the chance to bring Robert Tyner home and say goodbye.
For Tyner-Phillips, there was special meaning in the day they chose to lay her brother to rest.
It was her birthday.
“Today is my birthday,” she said. “And I chose to have the funeral on my birthday because I felt I couldn’t have received a better birthday present.”
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The service gave the family a chance to honor Tyner’s life and service — and finally close a chapter that had remained open for 58 years.
Tyner-Phillips said she believes her parents and other family members who died before they could learn what happened to Robert were celebrating when the family finally received the news.
“It’s just a marvelous feeling after all these years,” she said. “I know that in heaven, the day we got that news, my mother and daddy, and he, and all my people that have went on before were having a big celebration, because this was just something that nobody ever forgot.”
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