Records are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day. I can think of a

Records are public, but the problem is one of searching for a small needle in a large haystack: ~7k people die in the United States every day. I can think of a couple ways to narrow that down and get to a probable answer, but they all would take money, manual effort, or both. To your second question, any debts owed by the deceased would be paid out of his estate. There's no guarantee that creditors would actually bother, this long after the debts were incurred, or that an inquisitive third party would be able to usefully find records of the debt being pursued.