FEGLI Questions, recent death

Hi all, I hope this is the right place to post this.

My dad (61) died a few weeks ago and, thankfully, had prepared a folder with his will and other documents but, less thankfully, did so haphazardly and left quite a few information gaps—most namely being life insurance policies. Weeks before he died, he told me, and only me, about this file, as he was highly secretive about things due to being a fairly private person working in military IT/cybersecurity. i am completely positive he mentioned having life insurance during that discussion, but did not explain where/any policy info. My mother & I have already submitted an LI policy lookup request, but we are quite apprehensive in this moment of ambiguity.

There are a few caveats about his employment that make this more difficult to sort out. He was a Marine Corps officer for 23 years, retired and worked as a civilian fed employee on base for 14 years.

In 2023, while at the feds, he was subject to an investigation after being reported for creating a hostile work environment (don’t worry, he didn’t do that lol, i can attest to his docile nature) by a disgruntled subordinate. they ended up allowing him to retire on paper and even asked him to come back because the only evidence they had was either hearsay or testaments that he was loud (he had 60% hearing loss from combat & collected disability on it, so this violated ADA). He retired from DoD, continued work at a new company as a DoD contractor where he worked until dying. This company confirms he had a life insurance policy from them, but have yet to confirm details.

My concern arises from the fact that we have found several paystubs that show he was paying for FEGLI (code V5) and FEGLI optional (code ABC) for quite a while at the feds, but we contacted OPM who says they have no record of him in their system. Further, we were trying to submit the forms to report his death to OFEGLI/OPM and could not track down any documents that have his CSA #, which has made us fear that he didn’t continue the FEGLI after his retirement from the feds. The additional tough part of this is we do not currently have access to his laptop, phone or ipad, and we are fairly certain that he digitalized many documents and shredded the tangible copies but we cannot access those for the time being.

I’ve considered calling the lawyer he used to stave off the wrongful investigation/facilitate his retirement from the feds in 2023 to see if he knows anything, or to reach out to his most recent employer to see if they might be able to piece this together. I just don’t even know where to look for answers on this and I know that OPM cannot release any information about FEGLI policies due to privacy laws. I just can’t imagine that he’d pay so much for so long toward FEGLI only to lose the policy—he took money very seriously.

My apologies for the length of this post and thank you for any help guys.