Funeral home owner who stashed nearly 200 decaying bodies set to be sentenced
By Colleen Slevin, Matthew Brown and Jesse Bedayn, Associated Press
Colorado Springs, Colorado (AP) – It has been two years that nearly 200 decaying bodies have been discovered in a foul building at room temperature in rural colorado. Friday, the responsible man, owner of a funeral show, should be sentenced to the State Court for 191 corpse abuse.
Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, led a morbid racket for four years of their return to Funeral Home nature in Colorado Springs: assure people that they manipulated the cremations of his loved ones only to store bodies in a building infested with bugs and give them dry concrete resembling ashes.
Jon Hallford is already going to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. The hearing for determining Friday sentence will focus on state accusations related to ill -treatment. Family members will have the chance to describe the anxiety of learning a loved one slowly decomposed among lots of others.
“For me, it is the heart of the case. This is the worst part of the crime,” said Tanya Wilson, who travels from Georgia to speak to conviction. She hired the funeral show to cremize her mother and later discovered the supposed ashes that the family spread to Hawaii was not from the body of her mother, who had wasted in the Penrose building, a small town 35 miles from Colorado Springs.
A plea agreement provides that Hallford received a 20 -year prison sentence for corpse accusations.
Some families who have been victims of the case want judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement, because the sentence of Hallford should be sentenced simultaneously to his 20 -year -old federal sentence, which means that he could be released by many years earlier than if the convictions were consecutively.
“The scale of this is astounding. Why does the state believe that it deserves a advocacy agreement? ” Wilson asked. “There must be responsibility.”
If the court rejects the agreement, Hallford could withdraw its advocacy agreement and be tried, Bentley told a crowded courtroom while Friday’s hearing was underway. The judge warned that family members opposing a plea agreement that they could “open the Pandora box” because a trial would lead to the case for several months and prolong their sorrow.
Colorado has struggled to effectively supervise funeral salons and, for many years, had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. He had a series of abuse cases, including around 20 decomposition corpses discovered this week in a funeral show in Pueblo.
Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. His conviction on the accusations of corpse abuse has not been planned.
The couple was accused of having left 189 bodies to break down. In two other cases, the bad bodies were buried. Four remains had not yet been identified, said the district prosecutor’s office this week.
The hallfords obtained a license for their funeral show in 2017, and the authorities said that the organizations had started to accumulate by 2019. Many have been langui for years in decomposition states, some decomposed beyond recognition, some without imprint or on the grounds of bodies.
As the horrible number grew, Jon and Carie Hallford also frauded the federal government of nearly $ 900,000 in the aid of the COVVI-19 era.
With family money and the federal government, the hallfords bought articles Ritzy in stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti with a combined value of $ 120,000, sculpture of the laser body and $ 31,000 in cryptocurrency.
In 2023, a putrid smell spilled from the building and the police presented itself. Investigators have invaded the building, putting on danger combinations and carefully extracted the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.
Families have learned that their cathartic moments of sorrow – broadcasting the ashes of a mother in Hawaii or cradling the urn of a son in a rocking chair – were tainted by a deception. It was as if these signs of the mourning process had been torn off, unraveling the months and years of work through the death of their loved ones.
Some have made nightmares of what the decaying bodies of their relatives should look like. Others have been anxious by the fear that the souls of their family were trapped, unable to free themselves.
A mother, Crytina Page, asked to look at her son’s body, saved from the return to nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought that she was already spreading her mother’s ashes in Hawaii, said the family had cremated her mother’s remains after being recovered by the authorities. She waits for judicial affairs to end before returning to Hawaii to spread the ashes.
Brown reported Billings, Montana.
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