Emmett Pantin, 57, placed on a ventilator in 2008 after a severe stroke. For five years, he was repeatedly reported to have only one living relative, an older brother on active military duty “somewhere in Iraq.” No one asked the Army to track down this brother, Master Sgt. Gerard Pantin, even when the younger brother died at 62 in July 2013 and was sent to Hart Island, his name misspelled Patin.
In fact, the brothers were two of nine siblings in a family from Trinidad. Relatives there and in the United States had been trying to find Emmett Pantin for nearly a year when they learned from a website that he had died. Immobile, voiceless, suffering bedsores and depression, he had been transferred through at least four medical institutions under the supervision of a court-appointed guardian in his last year of life, records show.
“Before he died, they kept telling us they couldn’t find him,” Sergeant Pantin said when reached in Florida, where he had retired from the Army at 69 in 2015, after deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. “Up to now we didn’t know where the body was. I told them: ‘This is America. If somebody went to the hospital and went to a nursing home, how can they not know where he is?’”
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2016/05/15/nyregion/new-york-mass-graves-hart-island.html