FORT WORTH, Tex. _ On Dec. 4, 2008, a homeless man called 911 to report that he had found a dead body seated on a bench, slumped forward with the head resting on a picnic table, in Sylvania Park. The man’s belongings were in bags, sitting on the table.
Within 24 hours, the Tarrant County medical examiner’s staff had used fingerprint records to identify the corpse as Jack Wilborn Jr., 47, of Euless, Texas.
He died accidentally from a lethal combination of too much alcohol and too much morphine, the M.E. ruled. From Wilborn’s birth certificate, the staff identified his parents as Jack Wilborn Sr. and Priscilla Lee Wilborn, according to medical examiner Nizam Peerwani.
The office said it used an Internet database and crossed-matched the names with Social Security numbers to confirm that Wilborn’s parents were dead. On Dec. 22, when the M.E.’s staff had not found other living relatives, Wilborn was unceremoniously buried without mourners at Cedar Hills Memorial Park in Arlington at county expense.
The story would have ended there if not for the revelation that came two months later, when the M.E.’s office not only learned that Wilborn had surviving relatives, but that his deceased mother had achieved notoriety under another name.
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