Funeral home owners to enter pleas

Pair accused of storing 200 decaying bodies

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. — The owners of a Colorado funeral home where nearly 200 decaying bodies were found last year in a squat building filled with decomposition fluids and swarms of bugs are set to enter their pleas Thursday on criminal charges.

Jon and Carie Hallford are accused of corpse abuse, falsifying death certificates and sending fake ashes to families who then spread the cremated remains or kept them for years believing they belonged to their loved ones.

The disturbing details of the case left families grasping for answers, their grieving processes shattered after the deaths of sons, grandmothers and parents. Some have said they can’t shake thoughts of what their decaying relatives’ bodies must have looked like.

Its one of several criminal cases to rock Colorado’s funeral industry.

A funeral home was accused of selling body parts between 2010 and 2018, and last month, a funeral home owner in Denver was arrested after authorities say he left a woman’s body in the back of a hearse for over a year and hoarded cremated remains at his home.

The horror stories follow years of inaction by state lawmakers to bring Colorado’s lax funeral home regulations up to par with the rest of the country. There are no routine inspections of funeral homes in the state and no educational requirements for funeral home directors, who don’t even need a high school degree, let alone a degree in mortuary science, or to pass an exam.

Colorado lawmakers have proposed bills to overhaul funeral home oversight. They would require routine inspections and hefty licensing requirements for funeral home directors and other industry roles.