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.
But some coroners and medical examiners have no written next-of-kin notification policies, and the vast majority do not post the names of unclaimed dead to the federal database, an NBC News investigation has found.
The combined effect of these shortcomings: Each year across America, untold numbers of families are needlessly left in the dark after a loved one dies. In some cases, anguished family members spend months or years actively searching in vain for loved ones who’ve already been buried or cremated.
“The tools exist to solve many or even most of these cases,” said Erin Kimmerle, a forensic anthropologist at the University of South Florida. “It’s a matter of having the will to do it.”
Tens of thousands of bodies go unclaimed nationally every year, experts estimate, either because families cannot afford burials, the dead have no living relatives or because…
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