Homeless man’s family learns of death too late to stop cremation

An Ohio family is grieving after their loved one was cremated Wednesday, 41 days after his death.

Charlie Ray Brown, 54, sustained injuries when he was hit by a car May 25 on Tom Hill Sr. Boulevard in north Macon.

In the weeks that followed, the Bibb County Coroner’s Office tried to find Brown’s family.

“It’s sad because people are disconnected from their families,” Coroner Leon Jones said Wednesday after speaking to Brown’s son, Mitchell Brown.

Shortly after the fatal crash, Jones was told that Brown had children in Florida, but that proved to be incorrect, he said.

Jones, through Assistant Macon-Bibb County attorney Jansen Head, petitioned the court June 15th to have Brown’s body cremated.

“Coroner Jones has engaged in efforts to locate next of kin for Mr. Brown. However, all said efforts have been futile and unsuccessful,” the petition stated.

The court granted the petition due to public health concerns, and Brown’s body was then scheduled to be cremated Wednesday.

The Bibb County Sheriff’s Office and Coroner’s Office initially struggled to identify his remains and released the wrong name.

Two days later, they confirmed the dead man’s identity as Brown.

In the days that followed, Brown’s friends raised money for burial expenses and held a candlelight walk in his memory.

Friends and Jones raised enough money to pay for the cremation, and Jones sought the court order to defray storage costs at the morgue.

Monday, Brown’s son got a call from a private investigator who had been haunted by the case.

“This one struck a nerve because I had met him,” said Mike Lewis, of Central Georgia Special Investigations.

Lewis had bumped into Charlie Brown a while back at a Burger King, one of the homeless man’s favorite hangouts and the scene of memorials following his death.

On the way to the golf course one day, Lewis bought a two-for-one ham, egg and cheese croissant and offered Brown the other breakfast sandwich.

“He said, ‘No. I don’t need anything,’” recalled Lewis, who later learned that Brown typically refused offers for help.

When Lewis read the articles about Brown’s death and the search for his family, he looked for time to do a little research on his own.

“I have access to databases, kind of like the sheriff’s office,” Lewis said.

Monday, he found Brown’s ex-wife, son and daughter and phoned them.

“It’s been nine years, and the last I heard he was in a mental facility in Tennessee,” Mitchell Brown said.

Charlie Brown, who had three children, suffered from schizophrenia, and the facility would not give the family information about him, Brown said.

“Nobody knew he was in Macon,” Lewis said. “They didn’t know to search in Macon.”

Mitchell Brown, who lives in Mansfield, Ohio, said he last saw his father in June 2008 when his own child was born.

He was frustrated his father was cremated before family was found.

By the time he called, it was too late.

“I was coming down there to identify his remains and see him one last time,” he said. “Now I’m coming down to Georgia and bringing back ashes. ... For two dollars they could have turned around and done a background check.”

Brown said he would have paid for the funeral “110 percent.”

He appreciated the people of Macon for donating money to give his father a proper burial.

“They saw past the quirks and saw who he really was,” Brown said. “They have busy, fast-paced lives, and they still took the effort.”

Jones said he took the legal steps necessary to try to find Brown’s family. He plans to ship the remains to Ohio.

“I don’t cremate anybody without a court order,” he said. “People are very private. The American family is disconnected from each other, and this won’t be the last time.”

Terri Bruce, of Greenwich, Ohio, she has been like a second mother to Brown and his siblings.

“We’d been looking for him for 20 years,” Bruce said Wednesday as she was thinking about planning a memorial service.

If she had known he was living on the streets in Macon, she would have come for him.

“We just wish we would have gotten him home when he was alive,” she said. “We didn’t want to find him in this shape, but at least we found him.”

This story was originally published July 5, 2017 at 1:36 PM with the headline "Homeless man’s family learns of death too late to stop cremation."