Someone has to pick up the tab. His debts don't just go up in a poof of smoke the moment he dies or gets killed.
I think you have a fundamental misperception of the law. Secured debt is just that, secured. It does not go "poof." Unsecured debt goes "poof," sometimes in spectacular ways. If this guy had a mortgage on the house, the bank gets the house. It never belonged to anyone else in the first place. So the notion that someone "has to pick up the tab" is absurd.