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What happened to Aurimar was a matter of money, part of a pattern NBC News uncovered over the past two years: Across the United States, vulnerable people's bodies often are mistreated and their families' wishes disregarded as overwhelmed local officials grapple with rising numbers of unclaimed dead amid widespread opioid addiction, surging homelessness and increasingly fractured families. Reporters found that county coroners, medical institutions and others repeatedly failed to contact reachable family members before declaring bodies unclaimed.

In some cases, people were buried in paupers' fields as their loved ones reported them missing and searched for them. In others, corpses were sent to medical schools, biotech companies and for-profit body brokers without consent [emphasis added].