I was simply curious if anyone whose had their favorite pc whom died by doing something heroic or just got a bad roll was able to have their character turn into a free spirit?

What were the rules for them? How did it turn out?

Nope, but you can turn a PC in to a blood spirit!

A spectre/ghost would be more likely. You might have to be Dunkelzhan or something to pull off a full fledged free spirit.

That's nt to say that it can't be done. Comes down to GM decision of course.
Just remember that free spirits are very strong.

I had a player who's final act was to over summon a beast spirit (He was bear shaman, so of course a bear) at his highest possible force as a sort of suicide by summoning.

He was nearly full on his damage track, captured by the enemy, and decided he wanted a new character. His player was sort of The Walking Dead, if he had a better role playing representation of his character I would have considered turning that force 10 beast spirit into a somewhat animalistic version of the PC and set him loose as an NPC for the group to have encounters with.

I wouldn't ever consider letting the player be a free spirit, but turning the roleplaying quirks and attitudes of a PC into a free spirit NPC under a circumstance like that would have been good. Unfortunately the character was not very well developed so it would not have been clear enough to the players without spelling it out.

I ressurected a dead PC for one of my players once.

This was a character who owed Mama a favor (boston fixer) when he died, and I tied his return in with Ghostwalker breaking free.

To keep from overpowering him I made him into a Free Ghost, lacking the Materialization power. After awhile, when he'd amassed some karma and increased his Force he managed to get the Possession power and used the body of a loyal follower to move around.

This was a fairly high-powered campaign, however, and I wouldn't recommend it for low powered games - the group he was with completed both Brainscan (where he died after being captured by Deus) and Survival of the Fittest, after which they retired with the spoils of their victory and each around the 300 karma range.

(Some backstory on the character - it was an albino gnome voodoo priest of Ghede (yeah I know - the player is a min-maxer with a bent towards not totally sane characters), who had his own little gang of voudoun practitioners, with the second in command being his serviteur. It was her he ended up possessing, turning his little group into worshippers of him once he returned from the dead.)

Eventually, with the passing of the timeline into SR4, he became an NPC.

If controlled by the GM, it can work - but there are many risks inherent with introducing a Free Spirit runner. One 'good' thing is that he'll be forced to rely on the other runners and NPCs he REALLY trusts for karma, and that's the best way to control him or her. Limiting which powers the spirit can get can also be a good thing - back in SR3 there was a random table for it.