New York plane crash victim laid to rest

May 16, 2009 at 12:00a.m.

DAYTON (AP) — A New York plane crash victim, who had twice survived being shot down in helicopters in the Vietnam War, was laid to rest in his hometown Friday.

About 50 people attended the burial of Henry Clay Yarber, 62, at Dayton National Cemetery. The service featured a 21-gun salute.

Yarber’s daughter, Pamela Jones, said it took nearly three months for Yarber’s remains to be identified — through DNA typing and a titanium knee replacement — and then shipped home.

Jones said she was angry after hearing testimony this week before the National Transportation Safety Board about whether the pilots may have been fatigued before the February crash that killed her father and 49 others. Continental Connection Flight 3407 went down as it approached Buffalo Niagara International Airport.

Jones said her father was scared to fly after his service as a Marine in Vietnam.

“I’m livid,” Jones said. “I could just picture him [before the plane hit the ground]. I can just see his face.”

Yarber enlisted in the Marines in 1966 and served in Vietnam until 1970. Jones said her father suffered from various physical and emotional ailments because of the war and was disabled. She said he wrestled with post-traumatic stress disorder for the rest of his life.

“He used to have the night terrors,” Jones said. “I would hear him punching his headboard” when he was in bed at night.

Yarber moved from his native Dayton to Florida 30 years ago to pursue a career as a blues guitarist. Dayton residents still remember when a young Yarber electrified audiences in local nightclubs in the 1960s and ’70s with music that helped bridge the gap between blacks and whites.

“It seemed as though every time he picked up the guitar he was playing to a continually higher level,” musician Dave Hussong, host of a blues program on WYSO-FM, wrote in a memoir about Yarber for the Dayton Blues Society.

Hussong, who played in a band with Yarber in the ’60s, called him “a journeyman blues disciple who truly tried to shorten the distance between cultures, whether across town or around the world.”