The funeral home owners had given families fake ashes for years, trying to conceal the bodies.
Derrick Johnson buried his mother’s ashes beneath a golden dewdrop tree with purple blossoms at his home on Maui’s Haleakalā Volcano, fulfilling her wish of a final resting place looking over her grandchildren.
Then the FBI called.
It was Feb. 4, 2024, and Johnson was teaching an eighth-grade gym class.
“’Are you the son of Ellen Lopes?’” a woman asked, Johnson recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
There had been an incident, and an FBI agent would fly out to explain, the caller said. Then she asked: “’Did you use Return to Nature for a funeral home?’”
“’You should probably google them,’” she added.
In the clatter of the weight room, Johnson typed “Return to Nature” into his cellphone. Dozens of news reports appeared, details popping out in a blur.
Hundreds of bodies stacked on top of each other. Inches of body decomposition fluid. Swarms of bugs. Investigators traumatized. Governor declares state of emergency.
Johnson felt nauseated and his chest constricted, forcing the breath from his lungs. He pushed himself out of the building as another teacher heard his cries and came running.
Two FBI agents visited Johnson the following week, confirming his mother’s body was among 189 that Return to Nature’s owners, Jon and Carie Hallford, had stashed in a Colorado building between 2019 and Oct. 4, 2023, when the bodies were found.
It was one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the U.S. Lawmakers overhauled the state’s lax funeral home regulations. And besides handing over fake ashes to grieving families, the Hallfords also admitted to defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid for small businesses.
Even as the Hallfords’ bills went unpaid, authorities said they spent lavishly on Tiffany jewelry, luxury cars and laser-body sculpting, pocketing about $130,000 clients paid for cremations.
They were arrested in Oklahoma in November 2023 and charged with abusing nearly 200 corpses.
Hundreds of families learned from officials that the ashes they ceremonially spread or kept close weren’t actually their loved ones’ remains. The bodies of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and babies had moldered in a room-temperature building in Colorado.
Jon Hallford will be sentenced Friday, facing between 30 to 50 years in prison, and Carie Hallford in April after a judge accepted their plea agreements in December. Attorneys for Jon and Carie Hallford did not respond to an AP request for comment.
Johnson, 45, who’s suffered panic attacks since the FBI called, promised himself that he would speak at Hallford’s sentencing and ask for the maximum penalty.
“When the judge passes out how long you’re going to jail, and you walk away in cuffs,” he said, “you’re gonna hear me.”“She lied”
Jon and Carie Hallford were a husband-and-wife team who advertised “green burials” without embalming as well as cremation at their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.
She would greet grieving families, guiding them through their loved ones’ final journey. He was less seen.
Johnson called the funeral home in early February 2023, the week his mother died. Carie Hallford assured him she would take good care of his mother, Johnson said.
Days later, she handed Johnson a blue box containing a zip-tied plastic bag with gray powder, saying those were his mother’s ashes.
