I'm going to reply to this from two standpoints.
1: The person killing the other
Going to be completely honest, Munch and I were "going on an adventure!" and we were running around through different herogates. The server is heavily based around PvP and fighting other players, as well as players gaining & attaining elo. If I felt bad and had a guilty conscience for every new player I killed along the way while going somewhere, or getting sidetracked. I usually leave death chests unless I know that the person has items or things that I definitely want. If you're helping a newer player, you should know the nature of the server as it is advertised, Hardcore PvP, and expect something like this to happen, and explain it to them.
2: Being killed
On the other hand, there's the shitty feeling of being killed on your first day or your first day back from a long period of time. I saw, you played for a few days before the incident that is in discussion, and you must've known the nature of the server in the two or three days that you're back. All that aside, being killed when you're a low level is pretty shit. You work hard to get whatever you've managed to scrap up, only to be killed, and in this case, not have a death chest spawn. We don't expect the bugs to happen, and it's not something that people know about right away when logging on. I've logged on after being gone all day only to find out that when I killed someone, their chest didn't spawn or anything.
I've been there and been the new player with nothing. My first three days on the server I was camped relentlessly because my first town was right by a graveyard, and my friends and I lost a lot, if not everything those first few days. A lot of this server now is about trial and error, learning from your mistakes, and it is also advertised as a hardcore PvP server, and will as such be treated as one.
That being said (again) I think there should be a lenience time for new(er) players to become acquainted with the nature of the server, a safe time of a few hours or so.