Kilgore Officer Recognized for Tenacity

KILGORE — A Kilgore police officer is recognized by her city for not giving up on a former Marine. In September of 2015, someone discovered a box containing cremated human remains, with the name Donald Krell, in a Walmart grocery cart. Over the next year, Angela Burch, who has been on the force for 21 years, learned Krell was a veteran who was supposed to be buried in a nearby county. They didn’t want him interned there. She tracked down his daughter in England, who gave her his death certificate. Burch then arranged to have him laid to rest in the Kilgore Memorial Cemetery, in a donated plot, on Veterans Day last year. As to why she was so tenacious, Burch says it was “because he’s a human being, and he was a veteran, and he deserved all our respect to give him a…final resting place.” Krell served in Korea. He was in his late 70s, and he died in Palestine.