Journalism is not mindless parroting of online sources. Sometimes you may have to actually ask a living person a question on behalf of your audience, or do records requests. In this case, as a non-journalist, my first vector of attack would be to get the official death record from the county where DCH died.

Seems like an obvious thing to do whenever writing a "notable person X has died" article.

The obituary, for instance, says he died on the 27th. The Macomb County records office [0] says he died on 26 September 2016.

[0] https://macombvitals.macombcountymi.gov/death.php (search for David Hahn)

The reporter could have done some investigating.

if they are reporting the news they can dig a little bit further than just reading the obituary