HOLLADAY, Utah Doralee Freebairn remembers the day well. It was September 1961. Her older brother was on a Boy Scouts trip, hiking in the canyons of Zion National Park.

She was in the yard at home in Salt Lake City watering plants when news crackled over the radio. There had been a massive flash flood in the Narrows.

"I thought, 'Oh, that's where Alvin is,'" Freebairn recalled Friday. "Then it just turned into a nightmare."

Five people were swept away and presumed dead, but searchers never found the bodies of Freebairn's then 17-year-old older brother, Alvin Nelson, or his best friend, Frank Johnson.

This week, some 51 years later, Freebairn finally got the news she had been waiting for.

Authorities matched DNA to a skull fragment found by a man swimming in the Virgin River in 2006. It was Alvin.

"It's kind of a nice birthday present," said Freebairn, who turned 66 last month. "But after so many years, it really doesn't bring closure. It's been a long time."

She sat in her home outside Salt Lake City on Friday flipping through old newspaper clippings about the search for bodies back then. She smiled and told stories about Alvin as she looked at graying photos from an album she pulled from a box in the closet.

"I'll tell you, not finding a body was rough," Freebairn said.

Her father left the family when they were young. It was just her mother and Alvin, the man of the house.

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DNA links skull fragment to Utah Boy Scout missing since 1961 flood; teen's body never found