27-05-2025
GA salvage worker finds WWII vet's Purple Heart in junk pile. Here's the journey to return it
It almost sounds like something out of a movie. A WWII veteran's Purple Heart, gone for decades, was recently found in Newnan, in a junk heap.
A salvage worker ran across the medal after the case containing it got lodged under the seat of his forklift.
Inscribed on the medal was the name 'David T. McMahon.'
Purple Hearts are given to U.S. service members who are injured or killed in the line of duty.
Realizing the significance of the medal, that worker took it to the Newnan VFW to see if they could help track down the owner.
That's where Steve Quesinberry steps in.
Quesinberry is a history professor at the University of West Georgia in Coweta County, and has also published a book documenting veterans who died in Coweta County in the Vietnam War.
'I've tracked down a lot of family members and friends to try to get their story, because I was afraid those guys were going to be forgotten,' Quesinberry told Michigan Live. 'For some of them, they were forgotten, and it took me a long time to dig stuff up about their life.'
Quesinberry started doing what he does best: researching.
According to records he found, McMahon was originally born in New York and moved to Grand Rapids, Michigan.
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He went to school there and eventually enrolled in the U.S. Army two months after Pearl Harbor.
'It sounds like he was one of those guys who heard about Pearl Harbor and said, 'I'm dropping whatever I'm doing and joining the military,'' Quesinberry said.
McMahon was eventually stationed in the Philippines at the time of his death. McMahon's fighter plane inexplicably crashed while taking off on Jan. 26, 1945. He died from injuries three days later.
Quesinberry told the newspaper that he didn't find any local relatives here in Georgia but did find an article about McMahon in the Grand Rapids Press, where his parents' names were listed.
Using that article, Quesinberry was able to track down McMahon's last living relative, a 77-year-old niece living in California named Lee Colodzin.
Colodzin said her parents didn't talk much about her uncle, other than that he died in WWII. Colodzin's parents died when she was 19, and her brother was 14, the newspaper said.
'I think it was back in the age when people compartmentalized themselves and didn't talk about things that hurt,' Colodzin said. 'Even though I never met my uncle, this has brought up a lot of emotion for me; thinking about him and thinking about my mother, who lost her favorite brother.'
Quesinberry said the Newnan VFW is making plans to send the medal to California so Colodzin can have it.
And now with the medal heading to a family member, how it ended up in junk heap in Newnan remains a eventually
