I agree that replacing it is the safer option. We can't ever say for sure that a character's name hasn't been used in another novel or, for that matter, on a sports team, a band, in politics, on social media. . . I just had to change a Welsh character's name in a nearly completed ms because it was identical to a hugely popular member of the Wales national football team (a fact I missed since I'm not a fan.) Luckily, there are multiple phonetic spellings of ethnic names, so it was only a matter of changing one letter.
