Either someone did that to make a statement or it was an error. Many newspapers will have a flag logo next to the name of a veteran’s obit. Maybe someone mistakenly put it there (i.e., the “U.S. Flag” and symbol was stored in HTML and
cut and pasted there...?)_
It’s not a copy and paste; the page is generated with queries looking like “FROM obituaries SELECT WHERE date=(today)” that return “name, age, image, article, etc.” from which the piece of html is generated. The generator code could have a bug, the data input (editor’s side) could have a bug, or somebody simply added that register.