Tim Murphy was a Desert Storm veteran and (technically) the murder victim in The Patriot in Purgatory.
Biography[]
After returning from Desert Storm, where a munitions dump he was stationed in exploded, killing his friends Walken, Moore, and Park when they rescued him, Murphy suffered from PTSD due to his guilt over surviving where his friends didn't. His mental difficulties eventually drove him to leave his wife and son and live on the streets to try and escape his memories. Although he eventually 'settled in' to life in a homeless shelter, holding on to a photograph of his family, Murphy constantly stood outside the Pentagon yelling out his friends' names, trying to get someone to pay attention to him so that he could argue for them to receive posthumous recognition for their actions, but everyone assumed that he was just delusional, interpreting his yells as him saying 'Walk in Moore Park' rather than the individual names.
9/11[]
When the plane hit the Pentagon as part of the 9/11 attacks, Murphy sustained a slight injury to his ribs when a piece of lamppost that had been dislodged by the plane struck him in the side. Despite his injury and his anger at the Pentagon for ignoring him for so long, Murphy hurried into the Pentagon when he saw the damage, going to great lengths to rescue Pentagon employees Warren Kirk, James Donzig and Diane Rollins from the rubble. Unfortunately, the strain of lifting the hundreds of pounds of debris that had fallen on the three people caused greater damage to Murphy's shoulders, ribs, spine, and knees, which cracked the rib, puncturing his lung, and internal bleeding occurred over the next ten days. With his status as a homeless person causing people to ignore him, Murphy was left to stagger around Washington for 10 days in agony until he died behind a car park, with the people who discovered his body simply dismissing him as another homeless person and considering him unimportant.
Post-Mortem[]
His remains eventually ended up in bone storage in the Jeffersonian, eventually being randomly assigned to intern Arastoo Vaziri as part of a project by Doctor Temperance Brennan to motivate the interns' ability to work as a team by identifying various unknown sets of remains stored in Limbo. Finding himself troubled by the anomalies in the report on Murphy's remains, Arastoo eventually brought the entire team into the investigation, determining that Murphy had been present at the Pentagon attack based on various trace elements on the fragment in his rib, as well as an old bullet wound allowing Seeley Booth to identify Murphy as a former soldier. The team's subsequent investigation identified the reason for Murphy's yells in front of the Pentagon and put together a timeline of what happened to him during and after the Pentagon's destruction.
Murphy's remains were laid to rest at Arlington National Cemetery during a funeral attended by his wife, his son, the three lives he saved at the Pentagon, and the Jeffersonian team. Seeley Booth, dressed in his full dress uniform, delivered a eulogy in which he assured Murphy's son Sean that his father was a brave and noble man, proclaiming that they lay him to rest today as a hero, Booth saluting Murphy's coffin while another soldier handed Murphy's widow the folded flag that had been draped over his coffin. Booth later told Bones that he would make sure Murphy's friends got the recognition they deserved as it was the least he could do for Murphy.