Did the police inform you of that? To my knowledge, that is not a thing.

This would definitely apply to guns, and they would be collected by PD at the time the unit contents are bought, but not remains.

It may be a waiting game, but I do hope you are able to recover your fathers remains and family photos from the buyer.

I don't know specifically how Public Storage does their unit auctions, but in general, once a buyer has paid for the unit all the contents in the unit are legally the buyers.

As you've already done, you can request the storage facility to request that the buyer hand over any personal belongings to them to give to you, but they buyer isn't bound by anything to actually do so. Repeatedly calling the facility won't do any good as you've found out.

At this point they are most likely just waiting on the buyer to get back to them about the items, if they even do so. Depending on how the buyer operates, they may not have even gone through the items yet. Usually they will just load up everything as they have a set time frame to have the unit empty and then go through it at a later date.