MIDDLETOWN, Ind. (AP) — Staff Sgt. Halex Hale is being remembered as a fun-loving guy who liked to make people laugh.

A celebration of life was held Wednesday for the U.S. airman in his central Indiana hometown at Middletown Church of the Nazarene. His body was found July 12 in a northern Italy river near Aviano Air Base after he left a party and went missing.

His father, Lance Hale, said the 24-year-old airman “always liked to be the one to make everyone in the crowd laugh and pull pranks. … He always wanted to make sure everyone was having a good time.”

The (Anderson) Herald Bulletin reports about 125 cars participated in a procession to the airman’s final resting place in Mechanicsburg Cemetery, where five generations of Hale men have been buried.