Father of missing Ohio soldier says Army confirms son’s death

BATAVIA, Ohio (AP) — The father of a soldier listed as missing-captured in Iraq since 2004 said Sunday the military informed him that his son’s remains were found in Iraq.

Keith Maupin said at a news conference in suburban Cincinnati that an Army general told him that DNA was used to identify his son.

Sgt. Matt Maupin was a 20-year-old private first class when he was captured April 9, 2004, when his fuel convoy, part of the 724th Transportation Company, was ambushed west of Baghdad.

A week later, the Arab television network Al-Jazeera aired a videotape showing Maupin sitting on the floor surrounded by five masked men holding automatic rifles.

That June, Al-Jazeera aired another tape purporting to show a U.S. soldier being shot. But the dark and grainy tape showed only the back of the victim’s head and not the actual shooting.

The Maupin family refused to believe it was their son, and the Army had listed him as missing-captured.

An official statement on Sgt. Maupin would be released today, said Lt. Lee Packnett, an Army public affairs officer in Washington. Packnett confirmed that the Maupin family was notified Sunday that their son’s remains were identified.

His parents lobbied hard for the Army to continue listing Matt as missing-captured, fearing that another designation would erode the effort to find him.

“You never stop hoping. You never know,” Carolyn said in 2006 after Iraqi al-Qaida leader Abu Musab al-Zarqawi was killed in a U.S. airstrike, leading to speculation that U.S. intelligence could be getting closer to learning Maupin’s fate.

Sgt. Keith Matthew Maupin was known as “Matt.” He graduated from Glen Este High School, just east of Cincinnati, in 2001 and attended the University of Cincinnati for a year before joining the Army Reserves.

Dan Simmons, the athletic director at Glen Este, remembered Maupin as a quiet but hardworking backup player on the school’s football team.

“Matt was a selfless kid on the football field,” Simmons said. “He did whatever the coaches told him. He wasn’t a starter, but he made the other kids play harder.”