A Brooklyn boy is finally coming home

DNA solves WW2 mystery of lost NYer

A Brooklyn woman has helped officials identify the remains of her uncle, a Marine in World War II, 74 years after he was killed — using her own DNA.

Nancy Lewis, of Bensonhurst, sent in her DNA sample 2¹/2 years ago, hoping it could lead military officials to the remains of Pvt. Joseph C. Carbone — who was killed on Nov. 20, 1943, the first day of the Battle of Tarawa.

“Nobody thought of giving DNA, so I called and I asked them,” she told The Post. “I was like, ‘ I’m still in shock’ . . . Oh, my God, [my family] is all ecstatic about it.”

Carbone, who grew up on Gold Street in Brooklyn Heights, wanted to join the Marines when he was 17, but his mother wouldn’t allow it, his nephew Joseph Caramanica said. She finally let him go when he turned 18.

About a year later, the family received a telegram saying Carbone was missing in action.

Six months later, Carbone’s mother, Nancy, saw a newspaper article with a photo of a blind nurse on a plane aiding the wounded — and was convinced that one of the men was Carbone, said his niece, Maryann Filippelli, who lives in Florida.

Nancy even went to Washington, DC, in an attempt to confirm the picture but was told “the information on this boy cannot be established,” Filippelli said.

Carbone’s great-niece, Christine Caramanica Robinson, said Carbone always claimed he would never return home to his mother “if he ever was disfigured.”

“They thought he may not have wanted to come home, because God forbid he may have had a limb amputated. That was kind of always her hope that she’d find him,” said Robinson, who lives in Moncks Corner, SC.

Two years ago, former Marine Ted Darcy and commercial pilot Mark Noah of the Florida nonprofit History Flight found a mass grave containing the remains of 35 Marines and one sailor, including Carbone.

Carbone’s interment services are pending, according to Pentagon officials. He will have a wake at Scarpaci Funeral Home in Bensonhurst and be buried at Calvary Cemetery in Queens, Filippelli said.

Filippelli said her mother, Anna Caramanica, who died about nine months ago at 89, would have been “on cloud nine” to hear her brother’s remains had been identified.

“First of all, she wouldn’t have believed it,” she told The Post. “When everything came out, she would’ve been like, ‘Now I could die.’ She always said she wished her brother would come back before she died.”

And Filippelli said she is sure her grandmother, Nancy, would have felt the same way.

“My grandmother always said [her son was] going to walk through the door,” she said. “Little did we know, he was going to come through the door in a different way.”