When a person dies- the last breath- will they breathe out or breathe in?

In my limited experience, death doesn't care whether you have breathed in or out. Most people will probably appear to have breathed out since breathing out is a sort of reflex that would happen due to the position of the body and the effect of gravity on the lungs.

I found a friend dead one time, and when turning him over to resuscitate, I remember hearing a strange sort of breathing sound coming out of his nose... I remember the sound gave me hope that he was breathing and may not be truly dead. He did not come back to life though, he was dead for hours (heart attack). Later, after thinking about this, I realized that his last breath must have been in. The sound came about because I had repositioned his body from crouching over the toilet (heart attack caused him to throw up). Since his lungs were full of air, repositioning him into a laying position made his lungs contract and relax, which forced some air out.

This is really hard to hypothesize because you'd have to define clearly what death is, then examine the death based on those parameters. I think if you don't accurately measure the death like this, you'd end up with a lot of results that seem in favor of breathing out. Since the breathing out could just be an after death reflex that appears like something a living person does.

The strict meaning of death seems like a gray area. I have heard a brain can stop functioning but the persons heart can remain beating... and vice versa.

As several people have pointed out, breathing in is generally active, and out is generally passive. You have to move your diaphragm down to expand your chest cavity, drawing air in. If you then suddenly died, the elasticity of the lungs and natural rest position of the chest will result in air moving back out without effort.

But actually dying isn’t usually like normal breathing. Outside of a sudden death, or traumatic death, people gradually worsen over days. They become less and less aware, and breathe less and less effectively. Toward the end, breathing is erratic and discoordinated. The body frequently uses accessory muscles like this in the upper chest and shoulder region to try to breathe. Usually this is ineffective. You can see the muscles trying, but little is happening, or happening consistently. As breathing fails, then a spiral begins, because muscles work less well without oxygen and in high acid environments from the CO2, plus the brainstem is failing to message the respiratory muscles as well. Sometimes the lasts breaths are just little jerks of the jaw as the last effort fails. There isn’t much going in or out at this point.

Other common events are pauses, as well as a “death rattle” or snoring sounds from air moving in an airway with lax muscles allowing partial collapse. There’s also often some wet rattling from un-cleared fluid

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