A US couple who ran a so-called ‘green funeral home’ in Colorado were told by a court to pay $950 million to victims’ families, nearly a year after some 190 decaying corpses were recovered from their facility.....CLICK HERE TO READ THE FULL ARTICLE>>>
The decision announced by the victims’ lawyer on Monday (Aug 5) came after authorities found that Jon and Carie Hallford, owners of Return to Nature funeral home in Penrose, Colrorado, had given fake ashes to grieving relatives after taking their loved ones’ bodies for ‘green burials’.
In October 2023, after reports of foul smell from their green funeral home, 190 bodies or body parts were recovered by investigators in a case that shocked America.
The couple had claimed that their burial services were environment-friendly, without the use of chemicals such as embalming fluids, and used biodegradable caskets to dispose of the bodies.
After the bodies were recovered, the Federal Bureau of Investigation helped in the laborious process of identifying the bodies through DNA testing. Several could not be identified.
Hallford who is in custody and his wife who is out on bail did not attend the court proceedings.
The criminal charges they faced included corpse abuse, theft, money laundering and forgery. State prosecutors had offered them a plea deal on 190 counts of abuse of a corpse but that is yet to come to fruition.
According to reports, it is highly unlikely that the couple will pay the victims, as they are in financial trouble.
Crystina Page was one of those who used the funeral home’s services to cremate her son in 2019, and was keeping fake ashes till his body parts were recovered from its premises.
“I’m never going to get a dime from them, so, I don’t know, it’s a little frustrating,” Page said about the ruling, as quoted by AP news agency.
The victim families’ lawyer Andrew Swan said, “I wanted to put them on the witness stand, have them put under oath and ask them how they came to do this, not once, not twice, but hundreds of times.”
After the macabre episode came to light, strict legislation was introduced in the state of Colorado on storing and disposing of dead bodies....CONTINUE READING>>
