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DENVER — The proprietor of a Colorado funeral dwelling and his spouse have been arrested Wednesday after the decaying stays of a minimum of 189 individuals have been just lately discovered at his facility.
Jon and Carrie Hallford have been arrested in Wagoner, Oklahoma, on suspicion of 4 felonies: abuse of a corpse, theft, cash laundering and forgery, District Lawyer Michael Allen mentioned in a information launch after a minimum of a number of the aggrieved households have been informed.
Jon Hallford was being held on the Muskogee County, Oklahoma, jail, although there are not any information exhibiting that his spouse may additionally be there, in accordance with a person who answered a name to the jail however refused to offer his identify.
The Hallfords could not instantly be reached for remark Wednesday. Neither has a listed private telephone quantity and the funeral dwelling’s quantity now not works.
Jon Hallford owns Return to Nature Funeral Residence in Penrose, a small city about 100 miles (160 kilometers) south of Denver. The stays have been discovered Oct. 4 by authorities responding to a report of an “abhorrent scent” inside the corporate’s decrepit constructing. Officers initially estimated there have been about 115 our bodies inside, however the quantity later elevated to 189 after they completed eradicating all of the stays in mid-October.
A day after the odor was reported, the director of the state workplace of Funeral Residence and Crematory registration spoke on the telephone with Hallford. He tried to hide the improper storage of corpses in Penrose, acknowledged having a “drawback” on the web site and claimed he practiced taxidermy there, in accordance with an order from state officers dated Oct. 5.
The corporate, which was began in 2017 and supplied cremations and “inexperienced” burials with out embalming fluids, saved doing enterprise at the same time as its monetary and authorized issues mounted lately. The homeowners had missed tax funds in latest months, have been evicted from one in all their properties and have been sued for unpaid payments by a crematory that give up doing enterprise with them nearly a yr in the past, in accordance with public information and interviews with individuals who labored with them.
Colorado has a number of the weakest oversight of funeral properties within the nation with no routine inspections or qualification necessities for funeral dwelling operators.
There’s no indication state regulators visited the location or contacted Hallford till greater than 10 months after the Penrose funeral dwelling’s registration expired in November 2022. State lawmakers gave regulators the authority to examine funeral properties with out the homeowners’ consent final yr, however no further cash was offered for elevated inspections.
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Related Press author Ken Miller in Oklahoma Metropolis contributed to this report.
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