1,500 Attend Funeral for Veteran Who Died Alone

“For four years, Bill and April McCausland lived next door to Edward K. Pearson in a Naples mobile home park. They knew him as ‘Mr. Ed,’ a cheerful soul who sat on his porch and waved at everyone who passed by.”

“On Tuesday, the McCauslands were among an estimated 1,500 people who showed up at Sarasota National Cemetery to salute Pearson, an Army veteran whose open-to-all funeral became a social media phenomenon after politicians and a CNN anchor tweeted about it. They were among the handful at the service who had actually met the man.”

“If Pearson, 80, had seen the huge turnout of so many people he didn’t know, Mrs. McCausland said, ‘he would have cried, then laughed, then saluted everybody.’”

“The turnout was the largest in the 10-year history of the Sarasota National Cemetery for an unclaimed veteran, said cemetery director John Rosentrater. Part of it was because of the social media campaign, he said, but he said part of it was because of the photo of Pearson that ran with his obituary in the Naples Daily News.”

The Patriot Post® · 1,500 Attend Funeral for Veteran Who Died Alone