The house owners of a US funeral house have been accused of spending almost $900,000 (£723,000) in pandemic aid funds on issues akin to holidays, beauty surgical procedure, jewelry and cryptocurrency.
Jon and Carie Hallford, house owners of Return To Nature Funeral House in Colorado, already face greater than 200 felony expenses related to final 12 months’s discovery of 190 decaying our bodies in a bug-infested storage constructing.
These expenses embrace corpse abuse, cash laundering, theft and forgery, together with allegations they gave households dry concrete as a substitute of cremated ashes, collected cash for burials and cremations they by no means supplied, and buried the fallacious physique on two events.
Now they face 15 additional expenses alleging they spent $882,300 (£708,000) in pandemic aid funds on objects together with two automobiles – a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti price over $120,000, journeys to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency, laser physique sculpting, and luxurious items from retailers akin to Gucci and Tiffany & Co.
The couple appeared in a federal court docket on Monday, the place the prosecution argued they had been a flight danger, having fled to Oklahoma final October after the decaying our bodies had been discovered and once more earlier than their arrest on state expenses in November.
The decide didn’t determine whether or not they need to be launched pending trial, as a substitute scheduling one other listening to for Thursday.
Return To Nature Funeral House in Penrose, Colorado. Pic: Jerilee Bennett/The Gazette/AP
The invention of the 190 our bodies, a few of which had been there since 2019, shocked the state of Colorado, which has a number of the US’s weakest funeral house rules.
Considerations had been raised way back to 2020 concerning the enterprise’s improper storage of our bodies however regulators didn’t act, permitting the variety of our bodies to develop to almost 200.
It was solely after neighbours complained concerning the odor that authorities regarded extra intently on the modest 2,500-square foot constructing in Penrose, about 30 miles south of Colorado Springs.
For the reason that our bodies had been found, dozens of households have been informed the ashes they got couldn’t have been the stays of family members.
