Colorado Springs' Return to Nature Funeral Home promised dignified cremations with no embalming or chemicals. Instead, Jon and Carie Hallford piled nearly 200 bodies in their fetid, bug-infested building and handed families urns of concrete dust. Mr. Hallford, already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges and on the hook for vast sums in damages, is to be sentenced today on 191 counts of corpse abuse.
[Tanya] Wilson said she and some other families want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford's state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.
"The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?" Wilson asked. "There needs to be accountability."
The "horrific odor" led investigators to the site in 2022, and the rest was hazmat work.
A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son's body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought she already spread her mother's ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother's remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii again to spread the ashes.
The funeral home had to be demolished after the bodies were removed, with media in attendance. An Instagram page remains, attended by furious commenters. The company's website is gone, but preserved forever at the Internet Archive.
Colorado has a problem with this sort of thing (previously at Boing Boing) as its funeral homes are not well-regulated. There's always something going on; 20 decomposing corpses were discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.
Previously:
• Funeral home for sale, sign warns that it's "Probably Haunted"
• Funeral home apologizes after corpse tumbles out of hearse into traffic (also in Colorado!)
