[cableshaft]

It's very plausible. I can see managers get bent out of shape for people taking sudden time off (which is bound to happen when a family member dies), likely because they don't have proper redundancy in place (at least that's been the case at pretty much every company I've worked for), and might be put into a bind as a result, and feel resentment against their employee when they shouldn't. So they get rid of them and hire someone else.

Most of the US has at-will employment, and they can terminate you at any time for any legal reason, and there's no federal-level laws on offering bereavement time off, so I bet this happens more often than you think (at least a cursory google search brings up quite a few people telling stories of it happening to them).