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Peter was buried June 8 at the Brookwood American Military Cemetery in England. His father later decided to have his remains returned home, and Peter was laid to rest in the Church Hill Cemetery, Martins Creek. I visited his grave this week.

From the beginning, his family and friends had hoped for more information about his death. In a letter dated July 2, 1944, Ellen Kroboth, Pokrifcsak’s girlfriend, wrote an Army chaplain on behalf of his family and herself. It said in part:

“The news of Peter, of course, was a very great shock to us all and quite hard to believe especially since he had been over there for only such a short time.

“We’ve received no further information what-so-ever about the accident … We must find out in someway, for it was Peter himself who told both his family and myself, if ever we were to receive news of his being lost, we were not to give up hopes unless we had some very definite information.”

They never got that information, which was classified until 1973. Beigel told me this week, “I think they thought he’d been shot down over Germany or something, which was not what happened.”

Beigel eventually provided a report to his client, Peter’s nephew, Frank Pados of Chatham, N.J. But Beigel came across Pokrifcsak’s name and new information a few months ago when he began working on a series of stories about American fliers downed on D-Day. He wrote a story about Peter on his blog and reached out to some of Peter’s remaining relatives and me.

Beigel told me two events influenced him to do what he does.

As a boy, he saw a famous photo of the crippled B-17 “Wee Willie,” left wing shot away, over Berlin. “I wondered, ‘Who was in that plane? What’s the story?’ ”