More outraged families say loved ones were wrongly buried in a Mississippi pauper’s field

This article is part of “Lost Rites,” a series on America’s failed death notification system.

FLORENCE, Miss. — For more than 10 months, James Aaron Moran’s family searched homeless encampments and shelters for a glimpse of his dark brown hair and deep blue eyes. They reported him missing to police. They called jails and hospitals. They posted about his disappearance on Facebook. At one point, Moran’s ex-wife says, she called the Hinds County coroner’s office and was told it had no record of him.

But that wasn’t true.

In early December, one of Moran’s relatives saw an NBC News article detailing how the outlet’s reporters had solved the mystery of a man who died and was buried in a pauper’s field without anyone contacting his family. The relative emailed one of the reporters, who found that Moran was also among hundreds of unclaimed bodies buried at the county jail’s work farm.

“He just didn’t deserve to be treated like that,” Moran’s mother, Cheryl Brock, said. “And I didn’t deserve to not be able to say goodbye to my boy.”

That pain and outrage has become a recurring pattern since NBC News started documenting botched death notifications in Hinds County last fall. The revelations began with the case of Dexter Wade, who was struck and killed by a police car in Jackson, Mississippi, and buried in a pauper’s grave last year without anyone telling his mother, and continued with the cases of Marrio Moore and Jonathan David Hankins.

Now another four families, including Moran's, have come forward to say that they, too, were not told about a loved one’s death and burial. Two of the familiesspotted their loved one’s name on a list of unclaimed bodies published by NBC News.

As the discoveries grow, so does evidence of systemic