Son of WWII veteran getting his father’s medals, with help of Mass. probation officer
Mark Costa, a Fall River probation officer, was overseeing about 200 offenders when a handwritten note in one of their files stopped him cold. It was a victim impact letter from the son of a World War II veteran whose medals had been stolen from his room at an assisted living center.
“He wanted to be buried with these medals,” the son, Fred Sylvia, had written. “I didn’t have the heart to tell him they had been stolen.”
Sylvia’s father died in February 2012, buried without the medals he earned as a rifleman in the European Theater. Costa did not see the letter until 2014, after the case had worked its way through the court and after he was assigned the woman who helped fence the medals and other property.
The letter gnawed at Costa, a veteran himself. On his own, he reached out to Fall River’s director of veterans’ services to see whether there was anything they might do. There was. On Tuesday, some two years later, Costa boarded a plane for Florida, carrying replacement medals for a veteran he never met, on his way to see a man he had talked to only by phone.
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