The owners of a Colorado funeral home where nearly 200 rotting bodies were found have been ordered to pay nearly $1 billion to families whose loved ones’ remains were abandoned.
Jon and Carie Hallford, a married couple in their 40s, were arrested last November after decomposing bodies were found at their Return to Nature funeral home.
The couple currently face a number of charges including abuse of corpse, robbery, money laundering and forgery, and a class-action lawsuit filed by the families was settled this week.
But Andrew Swan, a lawyer representing the victims, admitted the owners would not be able to afford it.
“I’m never going to get a penny 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. “At least,” Page said, this ruling “will bring more understanding to the case.”
Jon and Carie Hallford face 250 counts of forgery, theft, money laundering and abuse of a corpse after nearly 200 decomposing bodies were discovered at their funeral home.
This week, a judge ordered the owners of Nature Funeral Home (pictured) to pay $950 million to the families of his alleged victims.
On Monday, a judge ordered the Hallfords to pay $950 million to the families.
After the judge fined the couple a staggering amount, Swan added that she hopes the result will serve as an example.
“We hope the ruling sends an unequivocal message to the industry: bad behavior has significant consequences,” he said. National Public Radio.
While families can try to collect the court-ordered payment, Swan clarified that “it is unlikely that the defendants have significant assets, unfortunately.”
Before the alleged plot was uncovered, families claimed they had even been given urns containing the supposed ashes of their loved ones that were supposedly “concrete dust.”
His funeral home promised a more natural burial, offering to bury the bodies without embalming fluids or metal caskets if the families chose not to cremate their remains.
Relatives would pay more than $1,200 for a green ending, which also came with the promise of planting a tree in the Colorado National Forest.
The couple’s funeral home promised a green finale for family members, who would pay more than $1,200 for services that included tree planting in the Colorado National Forest.
Chrystina Page, right, holds back Heather De Wolf as she yells at Jon Hallford, left, as he leaves with his attorneys after a preliminary hearing, Thursday, Feb. 8, 2024.
But last November, investigators found nearly 200 bodies in “abominable conditions” inside the property, which had been left at room temperature to rot.
The bodies were found after neighbors complained of a “dead animal smell” covering the area around the funeral home.
Some of the bodies had been in the maggot-infested building for years before they were discovered following reports of a foul smell.
At the time of the raid, the company owed more than $120,000 in unpaid bills and had been repeatedly taken to court over unpaid wages and disputes with local medical centers.
When they were charged, investigators said the couple used family money to purchase two vehicles valued at more than $120,000.
In addition to their funeral home, they used a building in the nearby rural community of Penrose as a storage facility for bodies, prosecutors say.
In April, federal prosecutors also alleged the Hallfords lied to obtain $882,300 in relief funds, which they spent on themselves instead of their business.
Samantha Naranjo (right) discovered that mother Dorothy’s body had been stored for more than a year in the ruined building.
At a pretrial hearing earlier this year, FBI agent Andrew Cohen testified that the money, an adjustment to a pandemic-era small-business loan given to the Hallfords, was fraudulently obtained after Hallford lied about not being behind on child support payments.
At an earlier hearing for Carie Hallford, prosecutors presented texts suggesting she and her husband tried to cover up their financial difficulties by leaving the bodies at the Penrose site.
Relatives said they had raised their suspicions with the couple but were either ignored or brushed off each time.
When retired Army officer Tanya Wilson’s family received her ashes, her brother Elliot thought they were unusually heavy and confronted Carie Hallford.
When he took them to a nearby funeral home, he was told, “I’ve never seen anything like this in the range of appearance that one would normally expect cremated remains to have.”
Two families were so suspicious that they mixed the “ashes” with water and discovered that they solidified.
Samantha Naranjo discovered that mother Dorothy’s body had been stored for more than a year in the ruined building.
She told KRDO: ‘We were hurt, we were frustrated, now we’re angry. We want justice. Not just for us, but for every single one of those victims. Every single one of them.’
‘His family deserves peace, the community deserves justice.’
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