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It looked like nothing more than a bundle of filthy straps washed up on a beach outside Jacksonville, Fla.

“I know I drove past it at least five times,” park ranger Zack Johnson told Florida media. Hurricane Irma had just struck the area, and there was no shortage of debris on the beaches.

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But Johnson, a former Navy man, decided to take a closer look at this particular pile of flotsam, and soon found his attention drawn to faded, stenciled text on one of the straps: “LT (P) TROY.”

This easily overlooked bundle would turn out to be the missing link in a family tragedy from nearly 60 years earlier.

The last anyone saw of Lt. Barry Troy, he was piloting his F2H-3 Banshee into a dense bank of fog off the Florida coast.

It was Feb. 25, 1958 and members of Troy’s Nova Scotia-based 871 Squadron were in Florida for training exercises with the United States Navy. On this particular day, Troy and two others were to take off from Naval Station Mayport and land on the nearby HMCS Bonaventure, a vessel destined to become Canada’s last aircraft carrier.