Ex-funeral home owner sentenced to 18 years in prison after giving families fake ashes

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https://lite.cnn.com/2026/03/16/us/colorado-funeral-home-owner-sentenced

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From another article linked in the body of this one:

The Hallfords also face state charges related to the October discovery in of 190 sets of human remains improperly stored at their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado.

Investigators were called to the funeral home after receiving a report of an odor coming from the building, Fremont County officials said at the time.

From this article:

They were stacked so high in some places that they blocked doorways. There were bugs and maggots. Buckets had been placed to catch leaking fluids.

Jesus, usually when you hear something like this, it’s some organ smuggling thing. These people were literally just too lazy/greedy to buy a cremator, and used the money on cars, crypto, and other vanities instead. Wtf.

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If it helps any, the state is looking into finally having some sort of licensing / testing done with funeral homes to keep this from happening again.

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It’s a shitty thing to do and deserves prison time but 18 years is way too much imo.

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Do not desecrate the dead.

This has been a social code for millennia.

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18 years for one incident might be too much, but this is only about a month per desecrated body.

At least skim the article.

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I was gonna say, sentences in the US both server as punishment and deterrence. As outlined,it sounds like a big social taboo that was broken and it wasn’t broken randomly, there’s pecuniary gain and there’s a systematic breach. I am unsure if these are aggravating factors in the legal sense, but if not, they are most definitely factors considered in the sentencing guidelines and they serve a function and thus they are needed.

Everyone wants the state to be hard on crime; here it is, our opportunity to be hard on crime given the egregious nature of the crime. And it’s not like most criminal cases where the lines are blurry - there’s a bunch of bodies and the very clearly point in exactly one direction.

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Maybe you didn’t read the article?

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