GUILFORD–December 7, 1941 is remembered as the day the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. On that fateful day, 429 soldiers were killed aboard the USS Oklahoma, which remained submerged for two years until it was raised and the remains of 388 sailors were recovered. But they remained buried, many in unmarked graves in Hawaii, until now.

“Today we are here to announce that those 388 sailors are coming home,” said Sen. Chris Murphy, who along with Sen. Richard Blumenthal, made the announcemtn on the Guilford Town Green because of a connection to the town.

Advancements in DNA matching identified the remains of a couple of dozen of these sailors in 2008. Among them, Edwin Chester, the 19-year-old cousin of Guilford’s Tom Gray, who relentlessly pushed the U. S. Department of Navy for his cousin’s return.

“This is phenomenal the amount of people that this is gonna touch,” said Gray.

Gray says he had a great deal of assistance from his extended family nationwide. “We all had the same emotional attachment to Eddie Hopkins because our grandparents and our uncles and fathers and mothers all kept him alive for us,” said Gray.

State politicians and Connecticut’s U.S. Senators kept pressing the Department of Defense once DNA testing yielded the initial results.

“The Department of Defense is the biggest bureaucracy in the entire world,” noted Murphy. “It doesn’t move without extraordinary effort and persistence. And it moved here in large part because this was just the right thing to do.”

Blumenthal called this day among the best he has experienced as a public servant. “There is a principal in the military, which is leave no man or woman behind,” said Blumenthal. “And, that’s essentially what we’ve done here.”

Now, Eddie Hopkins will be able to rest in peace in his native New Hamsphire, buried next to his family.

“It’s his grandparents, his mom and dad’s name on the stone and right underneath is Eddie Hopkins name because [his mother] always said he’s coming home someday,” noted Gray

Murphy made mention of an old adage: “The saying goes justice delayed is justice denied, but not in this case.”