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The owners of a Colorado funeral home who allegedly stored 190 decaying bodies and sent grieving families fake ashes were ordered by a judge to pay $950 million to the victims’ relatives.
Return to Nature’s owners, Carie and Jon Hallford, took $130,000 from families for cremation and burial services that were never carried out, authorities said.
An investigation into the funeral home was launched by the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office in October after an odor coming from the facility in Penrose led police to the site.
Nearly 200 bodies were found stacked inside and the couple had fled Colorado to escape prosecution. They were arrested in Oklahoma in November and charged with multiple counts of money laundering, forgery, theft, and abuse of a corpse.
Prosecutors revealed texts in court between the owners in which one suggested disposing of bodies “by digging a big hole and treating them with lye or setting them on fire.”
The pair now face hundreds of criminal charges in separate state and federal cases, including abuse of a corpse.
But the judgment is unlikely to be paid out since the pair has been in financial trouble for years, The Associated Press reported. That leaves the nearly $1 billion sum largely symbolic of the emotional devastation wreaked on family members who learned the remains of their mothers, fathers or children weren’t in the ashes they ceremonially spread or clutched tight but were instead decaying in a bug-infested building.
“I’m never going to get a dime from them, so, I don’t know, it’s a little frustrating,” said Crystina Page, who had hired the funeral home to cremate her son’s remains in 2019.
She carried the urn she thought held his ashes across the country until the news arrived in 2023 that his body had been identified in the Return to Nature facility, four years after his death.
Dozens of family members have received similar news as the 190 bodies have been identified, shattering their grieving processes. Many are still picking up the pieces, haunted by nightmares of what their decomposing family member may have looked like, or burdened by guilt that they had let a loved one down.
“It just kept getting worse and worse and worse,” Makayla Pithan Trumbo, who found out her mom was at the funeral home, previously told The Independent.
There were also revelations that there were few federal regulations for the funeral home industry adding to the pain of the families.
“Every state has their own kind of needs and goals and what they think is important – so we try to not really push down and dictate,” Christopher Farmer, general counsel for the National Funeral Directors Association, tells The Independent. “We have recommendations, we have kind of proposed model laws … but we respect the autonomy of the state.”
In Colorado, nearly anyone can open a funeral home and the state doesn’t license operators. There also haven’t been regular inspections of the funeral homes in the state, according to reports.
“She was identified pretty quickly; we were able to get her remains from the coroner’s office, and we had one of the other funeral homes that were offering to do the cremation for free” complete the “proper cremation,” Makayla told The Independent, reiterating how Karan was “the backbone of our family.”
“And we all got new necklaces, and we got a new scatter urn, because we’re going to be spreading her ashes.”
While the victims and the class action’s attorney, Andrew Swan, understood from the outset that it was unlikely families would receive any financial compensation, part of the hope was to haul the Hallfords into court and demand answers.
Jon Hallford, who is currently in custody, is being represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases.
Carie Hallford, who is out on bail, did not acknowledge the civil case or show up to hearings. Her attorney, Michael Stuzynski, was not immediately available for comment.
