Jury awards family of man mistakenly declared dead $1.5 million. The wrong body was buried at "his" funeral.

Santa Ana, Calif. — A Southern California jury on Tuesday awarded $1.5 million to the family of a man who was mistakenly declared dead by authorities, resulting in a stranger being buried in the family plot.

A Superior Court jury found the Orange County coroner's office committed negligence and intentional misrepresentation when it declared Frankie Kerrigan dead in 2017.

The office said that Kerrigan, who was 57 at the time, had schizophrenia and frequently lived on the streets and had died that May outside a store in Fountain Valley.