A database that can help prevent pauper’s cemetery burials is rarely used by officials, NBC News finds
A free government database, NamUs, could help connect coroners and medical examiners with the family members of the dead. But the vast majority don’t use it.
This article is Part 5 of “Lost Rites,” a series on America’s failed death notification system.
In Louisiana, parents spent eight months searching for their 34-year-old son, only to discover this summer that his body had been identified soon after his disappearance and cremated without their permission.
Siblings in Michigan filed a missing person report when they couldn’t reach their 59-year-old brother, but they say nobody contacted them after police found him dead from an overdose. His body sat in a county morgue for 514 days, decomposing to the point of being unrecognizable.
After a man in California died from complications of Covid-19 and drug use, it took a coroner in California more than three months to notify his family. The coroner investigator’s explanation, the man’s brother says: “We dropped the ball.”
Death investigation experts say these mistakes are preventable. Coroners and medical examiners, they say, should adopt detailed written protocols for identifying and contacting next of kin. And when exhaustive efforts to find families fall short, experts say officials should post the names of the unclaimed dead to a government database where families can search for loved ones.
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