Who Is Chad Mulligan?

I'm currently reading American Gods, last year's Hugo winner. One of the characters, a police officer, is named "Chad Mulligan". What is odd about that is that there is also a character in Stand on Zanzibar, the 1969 Hugo winner, with the same name. The characters don't seem to have much in common. What's going on here?

A Google Search turns up a a police officer in Arkansas named "Chad Mulligan". At first I thought this was a joking reference to one of the books, but the site appears legit.

For what it's worth, according to Census data, 0.004% of Americans have the last name "Mulligan" and 0.165% of American men have the name "Chad". The 2000 male US population was 138.1 million. If the "Chad"s and "Mulligan"s are distributed evenly among the population, there should be about 9 "Chad Mulligan"s. Yahoo! People Search gives three. (None in Arkansas.)

I have no conclusion here. It's just a thing that makes me go "hmm".