Military honors bestowed on Illinois veteran identified nearly a decade after death

CHICAGO (AP) — Standing near the gravestone for the relative he never met, Mark Bailey accepted the crisply folded American flag from the Army officer, hugged it to his chest and closed his eyes.

Though the person he called his aunt — born Reba Caroline Bailey — had been estranged, missing for decades and died in 2015 as an unidentified ward of the state, he felt connection and a sense of closure.

“I want to let Reba know we’re part of the circle and part of the family,” he said.

Mark Bailey was among dozens of attendees at an unusual funeral service with military honors this week for an Illinois veteran with memory problems so severe that they died an unnamed person. The ceremony became possible because of an extraordinary cold case investigation that identified the 75-year-old postmortem.

Investigators unearthed the mystery of how the Women’s Army Corps veteran ended up homeless in Chicago with few recollections of their own life, aside from identifying as a man named Seven.

“I never knew I had this family member,” said Mark Bailey’s 19-year-old son Cole, who also drove from central Illinois for the service. “It’s nice to know I have somebody that’s been found and isn’t lost anymore.”

Since the investigation’s conclusion, the numbered cement cylinder that marked the unidentified grave has been replaced with a rectangular plague with a cross that reads: “Reba Caroline Bailey, PFC US Army.”

The case of Seven Doe, the name appearing in some official records, came to Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart’s office in 2023. The unidentified body belonged to a person who died of natural causes in an assisted living facility. They were a ward of the state, unable to remember a legal name or family.

The cause of death was heart disease with diabetes and dementia as contributing factors and the body was buried in a section for unclaimed people at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery on Chicago's Far South Side. The medical examiner marked it as the 4,985th case of the year and put the number on the headstone.

In 2023, investigators ran fingerprints taken postmortem and found a 1961 Army record for the veteran, formerly of Danville, about 140 miles (225.31 kilometers) south of Chicago. The search for close living relatives came up short; five siblings and an ex-husband had all died.

The family members they did locate had only heard stories of a relative who had disappeared. After making the identification, detectives ordered a new headstone with the same name on military records. It was quietly installed last year.

Commander Jason Moran, who oversees the sheriff’s missing persons unit, said it was rewarding to make sure the identified veteran got the benefit of a funeral with military honors.

“It’s just a privilege to be able to help families and really close the story,” said Moran, whose work on other high-profile cold cases has gained notoriety.

Several generations of the Bailey family have told stories about what happened to their missing relative since leaving the military to get married.

They've wondered about the possibility of children or their relative's gender identity. Some believe that there was a family dispute but the stories about its origins vary from the decision to join the military to sexual orientation.

Family members tried to find their missing relative over the years, including Amanda Ingram, who would have been a great-niece. She maintains a meticulous family tree with Census records and photos.

“It’s amazing how somebody can just disappear like that and not know what happened,” Ingram said this week. “I’m pretty sure we’re never going to know the details.”

On a winter day in the late 1970s, a person wearing a military-style jacket and aviator cap was curled up on the porch of St. Francis Catholic Worker House in Chicago. Residents who stayed there at the time told the Associated Press that the person asked to be called Seven, spoke in the third person and identified as a man.

Seven quickly became the house cook. The meals drew crowds to the neighborhood where several homeless advocacy groups operated, according to former residents' accounts.

Investigators have tried to explain the memory loss and floated theories about brain damage related to a 1950 car accident that killed Bailey's mother or to military service. That included stints at Fort Ord in California, a polluted former Army base, and Fort McClellan in Alabama, formerly used for chemical weapons training, and where the federal government has acknowledged potential exposure to toxins.

Neither family, investigators nor residents of the worker house figured out the meaning behind the name Seven.

Ingram, who lives in Alabama, couldn’t make the ceremony this week. But she asked volunteers from an Illinois chapter of Daughters of the American Revolution to attend on her behalf.

“Everybody who comes to visit that cemetery will pass by it and know who she was,” said Ingram, whose detailed family trees include records using Bailey's birth name.

Mark Bailey said he and his son wanted to bring something to the service that would honor both parts of their long-lost relative's life.

They had heard their relative had an affinity for the Cubs and looked for a jersey with the number “7” on it, but settled on a blue team cap. They set it on the headstone.

The service held Tuesday included prayers, a 21-gun salute and a bugler playing taps — a chilling, 24-note salute that is traditionally played at funerals of U.S. military veterans. Attendees included Cook County sheriff's investigators and Archdiocese of Chicago staff.

“I just wish the rest of them could be identified as well,” Mark Bailey told those attending while pointing to the rows of unidentified graves.

Dart, the Cook County sheriff, said the ceremony left him nearly speechless, saying the Illinois veteran deserved military honors and a flag from the U.S. president “instead of being forgotten and left as an anonymous number somewhere.”

Relatives said they planned to eventually display the flag at the American Legion in Potomac, near where the Bailey family has roots.

Mark Bailey said the acknowledgement of military service was particularly meaningful with so many veterans in the extended family. He hoped the memory would stay with his son Cole, who plans to enlist.

“For him, it’ll be something he’ll have forever,” he said.

Deacon Glenn Tylutki, of Chicago Catholic Cemeteries, blesses the grave of 75-year-old Pfc. Reba C. Bailey, a former missing person cold case named Seven Doe, during a military funeral Tuesday, July 1, 2025, at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Chicago. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague)

Robert Jensen and Mark Ethridge, right, of the Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 2791, perform a 21-gun salute during a military funeral for 75-year-old Pfc. Reba C. Bailey, a former missing person cold case named Seven Doe, Tuesday, July 1, 2025, at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Chicago. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague)

Deacon Glenn Tylutki, of Chicago Catholic Cemeteries, adjusts an American flag prior to a military funeral for 75-year-old Pfc. Reba C. Bailey, a former missing person cold case named Seven Doe, Tuesday, July 1, 2025, at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Chicago. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague)

Staff Sgt. Kobe Green and Master Sgt. Derrick Bailey, right, present Mark Bailey with an American flag during during a military funeral for his aunt, 75-year-old Pfc. Reba C. Bailey, a former missing person cold case named Seven Doe, Tuesday, July 1, 2025 at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Chicago. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague)

The grave marker of 75-year-old Pfc. Reba C. Bailey, a former missing person cold case named Seven Doe, is seen during a military funeral at Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery in Chicago, Tuesday, July 1, 2025. (AP Photo/Talia Sprague)

WASHINGTON (AP) — Becky Pepper-Jackson finished third in the discus throw in West Virginia last year though she was in just her first year of high school. Now a 15-year-old sophomore, Pepper-Jackson is aware that her upcoming season could be her last.

West Virginia has banned transgender girls like Pepper-Jackson from competing in girls and women's sports, and is among the more than two dozen states with similar laws. Though the West Virginia law has been blocked by lower courts, the outcome could be different at the conservative-dominated Supreme Court, which has allowed multiple restrictions on transgender people to be enforced in the past year.

The justices are hearing arguments Tuesday in two cases over whether the sports bans violate the Constitution or the landmark federal law known as Title IX that prohibits sex discrimination in education. The second case comes from Idaho, where college student Lindsay Hecox challenged that state's law.

Decisions are expected by early summer.

President Donald Trump's Republican administration has targeted transgender Americans from the first day of his second term, including ousting transgender people from the military and declaring that gender is immutable and determined at birth.

Pepper-Jackson has become the face of the nationwide battle over the participation of transgender girls in athletics that has played out at both the state and federal levels as Republicans have leveraged the issue as a fight for athletic fairness for women and girls.

“I think it’s something that needs to be done,” Pepper-Jackson said in an interview with The Associated Press that was conducted over Zoom. “It’s something I’m here to do because ... this is important to me. I know it’s important to other people. So, like, I’m here for it.”

She sat alongside her mother, Heather Jackson, on a sofa in their home just outside Bridgeport, a rural West Virginia community about 40 miles southwest of Morgantown, to talk about a legal fight that began when she was a middle schooler who finished near the back of the pack in cross-country races.

Pepper-Jackson has grown into a competitive discus and shot put thrower. In addition to the bronze medal in the discus, she finished eighth among shot putters.

She attributes her success to hard work, practicing at school and in her backyard, and lifting weights. Pepper-Jackson has been taking puberty-blocking medication and has publicly identified as a girl since she was in the third grade, though the Supreme Court's decision in June upholding state bans on gender-affirming medical treatment for minors has forced her to go out of state for care.

Her very improvement as an athlete has been cited as a reason she should not be allowed to compete against girls.

“There are immutable physical and biological characteristic differences between men and women that make men bigger, stronger, and faster than women. And if we allow biological males to play sports against biological females, those differences will erode the ability and the places for women in these sports which we have fought so hard for over the last 50 years,” West Virginia's attorney general, JB McCuskey, said in an AP interview. McCuskey said he is not aware of any other transgender athlete in the state who has competed or is trying to compete in girls or women’s sports.

Despite the small numbers of transgender athletes, the issue has taken on outsize importance. The NCAA and the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committees banned transgender women from women's sports after Trump signed an executive order aimed at barring their participation.

The public generally is supportive of the limits. An Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research poll conducted in October 2025 found that about 6 in 10 U.S. adults “strongly” or “somewhat” favored requiring transgender children and teenagers to only compete on sports teams that match the sex they were assigned at birth, not the gender they identify with, while about 2 in 10 were “strongly” or “somewhat” opposed and about one-quarter did not have an opinion.

About 2.1 million adults, or 0.8%, and 724,000 people age 13 to 17, or 3.3%, identify as transgender in the U.S., according to the Williams Institute at the UCLA School of Law.

Those allied with the administration on the issue paint it in broader terms than just sports, pointing to state laws, Trump administration policies and court rulings against transgender people.

"I think there are cultural, political, legal headwinds all supporting this notion that it’s just a lie that a man can be a woman," said John Bursch, a lawyer with the conservative Christian law firm Alliance Defending Freedom that has led the legal campaign against transgender people. “And if we want a society that respects women and girls, then we need to come to terms with that truth. And the sooner that we do that, the better it will be for women everywhere, whether that be in high school sports teams, high school locker rooms and showers, abused women’s shelters, women’s prisons.”

But Heather Jackson offered different terms to describe the effort to keep her daughter off West Virginia's playing fields.

“Hatred. It’s nothing but hatred,” she said. "This community is the community du jour. We have a long history of isolating marginalized parts of the community.”

Pepper-Jackson has seen some of the uglier side of the debate on display, including when a competitor wore a T-shirt at the championship meet that said, “Men Don't Belong in Women's Sports.”

“I wish these people would educate themselves. Just so they would know that I’m just there to have a good time. That’s it. But it just, it hurts sometimes, like, it gets to me sometimes, but I try to brush it off,” she said.

One schoolmate, identified as A.C. in court papers, said Pepper-Jackson has herself used graphic language in sexually bullying her teammates.

Asked whether she said any of what is alleged, Pepper-Jackson said, “I did not. And the school ruled that there was no evidence to prove that it was true.”

The legal fight will turn on whether the Constitution's equal protection clause or the Title IX anti-discrimination law protects transgender people.

The court ruled in 2020 that workplace discrimination against transgender people is sex discrimination, but refused to extend the logic of that decision to the case over health care for transgender minors.

The court has been deluged by dueling legal briefs from Republican- and Democratic-led states, members of Congress, athletes, doctors, scientists and scholars.

The outcome also could influence separate legal efforts seeking to bar transgender athletes in states that have continued to allow them to compete.

If Pepper-Jackson is forced to stop competing, she said she will still be able to lift weights and continue playing trumpet in the school concert and jazz bands.

“It will hurt a lot, and I know it will, but that’s what I’ll have to do,” she said.

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Heather Jackson, left, and Becky Pepper-Jackson pose for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

Becky Pepper-Jackson poses for a photograph outside of the U.S. Supreme Court in Washington, Sunday, Jan. 11, 2026. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

The Supreme Court stands is Washington, Friday, Jan. 9, 2026. (AP Photo/J. Scott Applewhite)

FILE - Protestors hold signs during a rally at the state capitol in Charleston, W.Va., on March 9, 2023. (AP Photo/Chris Jackson, file)