ROCKWELL — Eighty years ago, almost to the day, Technical Sergeant Thomas Odell Moss was killed by German artillery after three years of fighting in Europe. After the battle, German military recaptured Moss’ position, leading to his remains first being unrecoverable and, after the war, being unidentifiable.

This year, Army officials were able to identify Moss and his surviving family will bury him in the National Cemetery Annex on Friday.

Moss’ closest living relative is his niece Ann Adcock, who was a year old when he died and now lives in Kannapolis. So, when the Department of Defense’s POW/MIA Accounting Agency firmly established the remains as T. Sgt. Moss, the agency’s Sgt. Josh Buckner reached out to Adcock to give her the news.

“I want to thank the military for everything they do for the MIA soldiers. Even though I didn’t really know him, I wanted to cry. It’s a miracle,” said Adcock.

Adcock said that during this time, her family knew that her uncle had been killed during the war and how, but not much more. She said that her father, Moss’ brother, did not talk much about Moss but that she did know some about him.

“He just said he always helped on the farm, and that he was a good, caring man,” said Adcock.

Moss had married Nettice Buckhardt before the war, who sadly died along with their only child in childbirth. Nettice had one daughter before the marriage, Katie, and although legal adoptions were not common at the time, said Adcock, Moss listed Katie as his daughter on his enlistment papers. After the death of Moss and Nettice, Katie would be raised by Moss’ parents.

“I think she took a lot after her father. She was such a loving person and she would do anything she could to help everyone in the family,” said Adcock.

Katie did not have children of her own and died in 2006, leaving Adcock as the closest surviving relative to Moss.

“It’s truly a miracle that they found him and we can give him the burial he deserves,” said Adcock.

Moss’ funeral will be Friday, and will begin with a family visitation ending at 1:15 p.m. Russ Roakes from Powles-Staton Funeral Home, who is assisting the family, said that following the visitation, the funeral procession will be escorted by the Patriot Guard, the Rowan County Sheriff’s Office and the Rockwell Police Department to the National Cemetery in Salisbury, where he will be buried with full military honors.

Adcock said that she chose to go with Powles-Staton because her brother knew of the funeral home’s work with veterans and the military community, especially their handling of prior MIA soldiers. Roakes pointed to the funeral of Bertha Dupree, a veteran of WWII and Korea who died at the age of 97 with no surviving family, as one that has been particularly impactful to him and the funeral home staff.

“There were a lot of folks that came to honor her and they kind of stepped in to her surrogate family. The same with Mr. Moss, he didn’t have any children because he died at such a young age, so the public is strongly welcome to come to the visitation and the burial. We’ll step in as his family that day,” said Roakes.

Roakes invited the community to attend and honor Moss by lining up along the route, which will run from the funeral home in Rockwell along Highway 52 until the procession turns onto Statesville Boulevard and ends at the National Cemetery Annex, located at 501 Statesville Blvd.

Moss joined the Army in April of 1941 at the age of 27, months before the United States joined World War II. He served in the European Theater during the war, culminating in his service in the Hürtgen offensive, the longest battle fought on German territory in WWII. The operation was part of the larger Siegfried Line campaign, the operation that chased the retreating German military across northern France following D-Day.

Moss was involved in combat at the village of Kommerscheidt, located in the forest. To the American military commanders, the village and surrounding area was viewed as a strategically-important point because of its value in reinforcing the nearby major city of Aachen. Conversely, German military commanders viewed the area as an extremely important staging area for the planned Battle of the Bulge, and so German soldiers fiercely protected it.

Moss’ unit’s participation in the battle began on Nov. 2, 1944. Five days later, he was killed by an artillery shell, which was witnessed and confirmed several months later by a fellow soldier. However, because the Germany military controlled the area at the conclusion of the fighting, his remains were deemed unrecoverable.

After the end of the war, the American Graves Registration Command searched the area for unrecovered American soldiers and found Moss’ damaged dog tags in a mass grave, telling them that he had been buried there along with at least seven other American soldiers and three German soldiers. Four American soldiers in the grave were identified, however, three more were unable to be identified, with Army officials saying that any of the three could have been associated with the dog tags.

However, Moss’ story was not over, as new research by historians and scientists recommended that the three soldiers be exhumed so new testing and identification methods, including modern DNA testing, could be utilized. The three were disinterred in August of 2018 for forensic analysis, and Moss was positively identified in 2024 and returned to his family.