Robert Dumas still thinks his brother is alive.

For most of his life, Dumas has been trying to find out what happened to his younger brother, Roger, an Army machine gunner with the 19th Infantry Regiment of the 24th Battalion, who never returned home from the Korean War. He was captured Nov. 4, 1950, during a battle near the Manchurian border. The Army listed him as presumed dead on Feb. 26, 1954.

"I started this when I was 22," Dumas, 88, of Canterbury, said during an interview last week at his kitchen table, surrounded by documents he's amassed over the years in an effort to prove the U.S. government abandoned American POWs, including his brother, in North Korea.

The issue of Americans still missing from the Korean War has received renewed attention after the recent meeting between President Donald Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, who, in a joint statement after the summit, "committed" to recovering the remains of prisoners of war and those missing in action.

"I'm not interested in the dead ones. I'm interested in live guys," said Dumas, who also served in the Korean War.

His brother was reportedly held prisoner until August 1953. Witnesses said on the day other prisoners were loaded on a truck to be repatriated, he was led off in another direction by his Chinese captors, according to a February 2004 article in The Day.

If still alive today, his brother would be 86 years old. An American businessman contacted Dumas around 2008 to tell him that he met his brother during a trip to North Korea where he came across prisoners of war who were living in longhouses near a mining camp. The man told the Pentagon about the sighting but nothing ever came of it, according to Dumas.

The Defense POW/MIA Accounting Agency, on its website, describes finding American prisoners as a high priority "when and if information is presented indicating there is a live sighting of an American."

Since 1995, the U.S. government has asked more than 25,000 defectors from North Korea for information about Americans POWs possibly still alive in North Korea, according to the agency.

"To date, this effort has produced no useful information concerning live Americans. Most reports of live Americans in North Korea pertain to six known U.S. military defectors," the website states.

Dumas thinks the U.S. government could've done more earlier on, and alleges that government officials knew since the end of the war that there were hundreds of American soldiers classified as missing in action who were actually American POWs left behind in North Korea, but kept it secret because they were listed as presumed dead.

In 1984, he successfully won a lawsuit against the Army to change his brother's status from "missing in action" to "prisoner of war."

He has taken his plight to Congress, testifying before federal lawmakers five times, met with U.S. and North Korean officials, and even enlisted the help of the Rev. Jesse Jackson. In a Dec. 9, 1987, letter to North Korean ambassador to the United Nations Pak Gil Yon, of which Dumas has a copy, Jackson, who was running for president for a second time, indicated he was prepared to send a delegation to North Korea that Christmas to establish a process for returning the remains of U.S. servicemen. Jackson added he was willing to go as well "if it is possible that one or several U.S. prisoners of war will be returned with our delegation." The State Department stopped the trip, according to Dumas.

Today, he's at least pleased that Trump is talking about the POW issue. As he told his mother, who died in 1969, "I'll look for him as long as I can."

j.bergman@theday.com