This actually happened to my wife’s family. They had a son about 50 years ago who died shortly after birth because of a heart defect.
About 15 or 20 years ago my inlaws were involved in a lawsuit with their neighbor over an easement dispute. I was showing them how to look up their court case details online and noticed several entries, mostly traffic violations, for a person with the exact same first name, middle initial, last name, and date of birth as their deceased son.
They went to the police and sure enough some guy had stolen his identity. He ended up writing them an apology letter from jail months later. He had started to rack up a criminal record, mostly relatively minor stuff like petty theft, and decided he wanted a fresh start. My guess is he looked up obituary notices from around the time he was born, found one for an infant, and figured the parents probably never bothered to get a social security number for him. Then he probably got a copy of the birth certificate, followed by a drivers license, and then he was off and running with a fresh new identity.
His own mother had even started referring to him by his new name. And he probably would have gotten away with it if it wasn’t for a disputed easement.
