When 80-year-old Army veteran Edward K. Pearson passed away in Naples, Florida, on Aug. 31, 2019, the hospice care facility where he had been living could not locate any immediate family members. As Jeffrey Nieves, family services counselor at the Legacy Options Funeral and Cremation Services, told People, “We had had him in our care for a month and had made every due diligence call to contact family and nobody came forward.”
It was his obituary in the Naples Daily News that caught the attention of many in the community, both those who had served in one of the branches of the Armed Forces and those civilians who felt that someone who had served his country shouldn’t be buried alone.
