![]() I imagine my mom just being left on the floor within inches of decomposition fluids.” “I imagine my mom folded up and put in a storage tote. “I picture my mom in every single one of those situations,” said Wilson. About 40 bodies had been stacked on top of each other and some were stored in storage totes, according to the affidavits, which note the “unimaginable conditions” authorities worked in to remove the bodies while wearing protective equipment. They say that buckets had been placed under some bodies to collect the fluid. ![]() The affidavits describe how the bodies were strewn throughout the rooms and how Jon Hallford was seen on surveillance video treating a body more like a sandbag than a former human being. That echoed descriptions of the floors inside being covered with the fluid from decomposition provided during court hearings for the Hallfords. Authorities who responded found a stain coming out the front door that they say was the result of the decomposition of bodies, according to the affidavits. The bodies were finally discovered last year after neighbors complained of the smell coming from the building. Colorado lawmakers have dragged their feet in passing funeral home regulations on par with most other states - even after a separate Colorado funeral home’s operators were accused of selling bodies years before the discovery at Return to Nature. State regulators did not conduct any inspection of the funeral home while it was operating, according to the affidavits. The funeral home, which was based in Colorado Springs and used a building in nearby Penrose where the bodies were found as a mortuary, was first licensed in 2017. Keller did not respond to a phone call requesting comment. O’Donnell declined to elaborate on Keller’s 2020 email and the agency’s response. “Families could’ve been saved from this if they had done something about this,” she said. ![]() “The fact that he made a complaint and nothing was done about it just completely blows my mind,” said Tanya Wilson, who hired the funeral home to cremate her mother before learning that her mother’s remains weren’t in the ashes she had spread in Hawaii but languishing inside a building back in Colorado. The Hallfords allegedly stored bodies as far back as 2019, and the count grew over the next four years, as prosecutors claim they used the money they were taking from grieving families for lavish expenses. ![]() But the coroner received no response from the state agency, which has long struggled to effectively oversee the funeral home industry, according to the documents.Ĭolorado has some of the weakest rules for funeral homes in the nation with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators. ![]() The concerns raised by the Fremont County coroner also included worries about the improper refrigeration of bodies and were reported to a state agency in 2020, according to the arrest affidavits for Return to Nature Funeral Home owners Jon and Carie Hallford. By JESSE BEDAYN and COLLEEN SLEVIN (Associated Press)ĭENVER (AP) - A county coroner reported suspicions about bodies being poorly treated by a Colorado funeral home more than three years before nearly 200 decomposing bodies were discovered inside a decrepit building in October, according to newly unsealed court documents that raise questions about how the mistreatment of corpses was able to continue for so long. ![]()
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