Welcome home Sgt. Maupin

I hope this brings peace to his family.

The father of a soldier listed as missing-captured in Iraq since 2004 said Sunday that the military had informed him that his son’s remains were found in Iraq.

The man, Keith Maupin, said at a news conference in suburban Cincinnati that an Army general told him DNA testing had identified the remains of his son, Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin, or Matt, as he was known.

Lt. Lee Packnett, an Army public affairs officer in Washington, confirmed that the Maupins were notified Sunday that their son’s remains had been identified. Lieutenant Packnett said an official statement about the identification would be released Monday.

Sergeant Maupin was a 20-year-old private first class when he was captured on April 9, 2004, after his fuel convoy, part of the 724th Transportation Company, was ambushed west of Baghdad. A month after his capture, he was promoted to the rank of specialist. In April 2005, he was promoted to sergeant.

A week after his capture, the Arab television network Al Jazeera broadcast a videotape showing Sergeant Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.

That June, Al Jazeera broadcast another tape purporting to show an American soldier being shot. But the dark and grainy tape showed only the back of the victim’s head and not the actual shooting.

The Maupins refused to believe it was their son, and the Army had listed him as missing-captured. The Maupins lobbied hard for the Army to continue listing their son as missing-captured, fearing that another designation would undermine efforts to find him.

“You never stop hoping. You never know,” his mother, Carolyn Maupin, said in 2006 after an Iraqi Al Qaeda leader, Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, was killed in a American airstrike, leading to speculation that American intelligence could be getting closer to learning Sergeant Maupin’s fate.
Not forgotten, and now home.