I bugged Meow about a similar issue, wanted to grab the name Oberon for an alt, and apparently it's a first gen lvl 3 character that hasn't been played in months.
The real problem is that it adds a big workload for admins if they have to manually check and delete a character everytime someone wants a name that has already been taken by a character no one has/is playing. Maybe an autocleaner type thing? If no one has logged into a character for two months and it is first generation under lvl 20 with no heirlooms it gets automatically deleted?