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CHICAGO (WBBM) -- At long last, there is closure for the family of Clyde Mize, a 52-year-old Chicago man who died in May: a death that went unnoticed by the rest of the world.
WBBM's Steve Miller has an update on Newsradio 780 special investigation "Unclaimed."
More than 50 people attended the memorial service for Clyde Mize Monday. They applauded, as speaker after speaker remembered Clyde Mize the chef. The fashion plate. The father with a heart of gold. The drug addict who tried in vain to kick the habit that killed him.
Police say Mize's body was found in a drug house in the Cabrini-Green neighborhood on the 6th of May. He was identified by his fingerprints, and his criminal record showed a list of addresses. One of them turned out to be a parking lot. And that's where investigators' search for family ended.
Clyde Mize ended up on the medical examiner's list of the unclaimed. To be buried in the mass county plot with all the other unclaimed cases from May.
In the course of Newsradio 780's search for the life stories of the unclaimed, we noticed that Mize's official last known address, the parking lot, was across the street from Pacific Garden Mission on State Street.
At first, the mission told us Mize was not dead, that someone had just seen him. Then, ten minutes later, we got another call. It turned out Mize's ex-fiancee had not seen him in awhile. Since he told her he was about to make a new start. That he was moving to Minnesota. That was April 30.
Less than a week after, he was dead, his body filled with opiates and cocaine.
After we spoke with his ex-fiancee, we met with his son Clyde Jr., who is an attorney in Atlanta, and with his daughter Amia McCray of Indianapolis.
They claimed the body. On Monday, Mize was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Chicago.
His daughter Amia remembered her father in a eulogy as a man who, for most of her 34 years, came in and out of her life.
She said she wanted to share one of her greatest memories. The time her father installed a chandelier in her home.
"He kept turning the light on and off and on and off and on and off, and I kept asking him, 'Daddy, why are you turning the light on and off?'
"And he was so proud. He said, 'Baby, I know I may not have always been there, but every time you flick this light switch on and off, you will always remember me. You'll remember me.'"
Amia McCray faults police for not looking harder to find relatives of Clyde Mize five months ago. But her brother is more understanding.
At the memorial service, what was on both their minds, was closure.
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There are others like Claude Mize, men and women whose bodies went 'unclaimed' and eventually were laid to rest in paupers' graves.
Please help Newsradio 780 learn about the lives of the 'unclaimed'.
Read a list of names here. Is there someone you knew? Please let us know.
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