A round stainless steel pin marked his grave: "17-A-6," it said.

That's how he has been known since the 19th day of March, when he was put in the ground at Lakeside Memorial Gardens.

MONI BASU / mbasu@ajc.com/AJC (ENLARGE)

Jean William Levy, like many veterans, was eligible for a government marker. But Levy, with no family, lay in an unmarked grave until an old friend made the necessary arrangements.

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Only this week was his grave in Palmetto adorned with a headstone bearing his name.

He died Dec. 11, 2007, and his body was kept in the county morgue for three months while investigators at the Fulton County Medical Examiner's Office tried to piece together his life and find his next of kin.

His friend, Barry Wiener, an Atlanta attorney, says the man had no family. Mike Alsip, of the medical examiner's office, says no one stepped forward. He was buried in a pauper's grave.

Wiener was there that March day, distressed that the man he knew as a lawyer and a veteran would lie unnamed, unrecognized.

A short obituary in last month's Georgia Bar Journal held the spare details of a life of 83 years:

He was born in Evans in 1924. He graduated from high school in Augusta and served as a private in the U.S. Army. He fought in France during World War II. In December 1944, his body was shredded by shrapnel from a Nazi grenade, and he was sent back to recuperate in the Veterans Administration hospital on Clairmont Road. He was an outpatient for the rest of his life.

He graduated with an engineering degree from Georgia Tech, then earned his law degree from the now-defunct Woodrow Wilson College of Law. He was admitted to the State Bar of Georgia in 1959. He practiced general law and represented veterans like himself, disabled.

He deserved to rest with dignity, to be buried at Arlington National Cemetery, Wiener says. Instead, he was interred in an unmarked grave in a Palmetto cemetery that has a county contract and 1,800 such graves.

Hundreds of veterans — many from the Vietnam War who recoiled from society after returning home — end up in unmarked graves, according to the Georgia Department of Veterans Services But Wiener refused to let his friend remain one of them.

He contacted local veterans organizations, and ultimately the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs issued a standard granite marker, 2 feet long, 1 foot wide and 4 inches deep.

On Monday, the new marker was unveiled at a memorial ceremony at the cemetery. Wiener, a few veterans and state Sen. John Douglas (R-Social Circle) laid roses on the headstone, etched with a Star of David.

A rabbi prayed. A bugler sounded taps, and then a hush fell over the green fields lined with tall pines. A flag was unfurled over the grave, and a man who served his nation and lay unknown for all these months finally regained his identity: Jean William Levy.