http://www.news-leader.com/story/ne...-man-viral-facebook-post-identified/24080189/
Janet Franson, regional systems administrator for the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System, has followed the interest in helping this man in recent days and contacted the News-Leader to say he had been identified.
"I've been told they located his family," she said. "I don't have a name."
She said it was unclear, based on what she knew Thursday, if the man's family had ever reported him missing.
"There is a story but it is a sad one," she wrote in an email to the News-Leader.
Franson wrote, in an email to the newspaper, that while the outcome may raise more questions than it answers, the situation is a reminder to the public that there are people who live on the street every day who struggle with mental illness and drug and alcohol abuse.
"I would say the story is in the fact that we have so many of these 'throwaway souls,'" she wrote. "Because of their issues they deal — or don't deal with — usually family has washed their hands of them. So they live on the street and are victims just waiting to happen."
