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A hearse and van sit outside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, on October 6, 2023 [David Zalubowski\/AP Photo]\nCOVID-19 fraud<\/p>\n
Investigators described finding decaying bodies stacked atop each other throughout a dilapidated, bug-infested building.<\/p>\n
A judge in the US state of Colorado has handed a funeral home owner, who stashed 191 dead bodies on his premises, a 20-year prison sentence for cheating customers and defrauding the federal government.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors had sought a 15-year sentence for Jon Hallford, the owner of Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado, where he and his wife, Carie Hallford, stored bodies between 2019 and 2023 and sent families fake ashes.<\/p>\n
At Friday\u2019s hearing, US District Judge Nina Wang said the circumstances and scale of John Hallford\u2019s crimes, as well as the emotional damage to families he inflicted, warranted a longer sentence.<\/p>\n
\u201cThis is not an ordinary fraud case,\u201d Judge Wang said.<\/p>\n
Investigators were called to the dilapidated, insect-infested building in the small town of Penrose, about 160 kilometres (100 miles) south of Denver, in 2023 after reports of an \u201cabhorrent smell\u201d coming from the property.<\/p>\n
At trial, investigators described finding the bodies stacked on top of each other and being unable to move into some rooms because they were piled so high with human remains.<\/p>\n
FBI agents also had to put boards down so they could walk around the crime scene and above the bodily fluid that had pooled on the ground.<\/p>\n
The morbid discovery by investigators in 2023 revealed for the first time to many families that the ashes they had received from Return to Nature were fake. Court documents showed Hallford had sent families urns filled with dry concrete mix, and in two cases, the wrong body had been buried.<\/p>\n
In separate charges, Jon Hallford has pleaded guilty to 191 counts of corpse abuse in state court. He is scheduled to be sentenced for those charges in August.<\/p>\n
Carie Hallford is scheduled to go to trial in the federal case in September. That same month, she will attend her next hearing in the state case, in which she\u2019s also charged with 191 counts of corpse abuse.<\/p>\n
A hearse and van sit outside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, on October 6, 2023 [David Zalubowski\/AP Photo]
\nCOVID-19 fraud<\/p>\n
At Friday\u2019s hearing, Jon Hallford was also jailed for defrauding the US federal government out of nearly $900,000 in emergency financial assistance provided to Americans dealing with the economic impact of the COVID-19 pandemic.<\/p>\n
In a news statement, the US Attorney\u2019s Office in the District of Colorado said the Hallfords had \u201cdefrauded the Small Business Administration through fraudulent COVID-19 loan applications\u201d.<\/p>\n
Federal prosecutors said the Hallfords syphoned the money and spent it, along with customers\u2019 payments, on SUVs worth more than $120,000, along with $31,000 in cryptocurrency, and luxury items from stores like Gucci and Tiffany & Co.<\/p>\n
In addition to his jail sentence, Jon Hallford was also \u201cordered to pay $1,070,413.74 in restitution for a conspiracy to commit wire fraud\u201d, according to the District of Colorado.<\/p>\n
The District of Colorado statement said the Hallfords had \u201ccollected more than $130,000 from grieving families for funeral services that were never provided\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cInstead of ensuring proper disposition of the remains, Hallford allowed bodies to accumulate in various states of decay and decomposition inside the funeral home\u2019s facility,\u201d it said.<\/p>\n
According to an order suspending the home\u2019s registration as a funeral establishment, Jon Hallford had claimed when the bodies were discovered \u201cthat he practises taxidermy\u201d at the property.<\/p>\n
In court before the sentencing, Jon Hallford told the judge that he opened Return to Nature to make a positive impact on people\u2019s lives, but \u201cthen everything got completely out of control\u201d.<\/p>\n
\u201cI am so deeply sorry for my actions,\u201d he said. \u201cI still hate myself for what I\u2019ve done.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Investigators described finding decaying bodies stacked atop each other throughout a dilapidated, bug-infested building. A judge in the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":220442,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5311],"tags":[188,12,49,978,286,659],"class_list":{"0":"post-220441","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-united-states","8":"tag-crime","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-united-states","11":"tag-us","12":"tag-us-canada","13":"tag-usa"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@uk\/114759197238209389","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220441","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=220441"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/220441\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/220442"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=220441"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=220441"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=220441"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}