COLORADO – The owners of a Colorado funeral home who allegedly preserved 190 decomposing bodies and sent artificial ashes to grieving families have been ordered by a judge in a civil lawsuit to pay $950 million to the victims’ relatives, their lawyer said Monday.

The judgment is unlikely to be paid out because owners Jon and Carie Hallford have been in financial trouble for years and are facing hundreds of federal and state criminal charges in various cases, including desecration of corpses and allegations that they bilked families out of $130,000 for cremations and burials they never performed.

The sum of nearly a billion dollars symbolizes the emotional devastation of family members who learned that the remains of their mothers, fathers or children were not lying in the ashes they had ceremoniously scattered or tightly clutched, but were rotting in a vermin-infested building.

“I’ll never get a dime from them, so, I don’t know, it’s a little frustrating,” said Crystina Page, who hired the funeral home Return to Nature to cremate her son’s remains in 2019.

She carried the urn she believed contained his ashes across the country until news arrived in 2023 that his body had been identified at the Return to Nature facility four years after his death.

Dozens of family members received similar messages as the 190 bodies were identified, shattering their grieving processes. Many are still picking up the rubble, haunted by nightmares imagining what their decomposing family member might have looked like or burdened by guilt over abandoning a loved one.

“If nothing else,” Page said, “this ruling will at least lead to greater understanding of the case.”

“I hope it makes people think, ‘Oh, wow, this isn’t just about ashes,'” she said, adding that far more people are affected than just those named in the lawsuit.

The victims and class action attorney Andrew Swan knew from the start that the families were unlikely to receive any financial compensation, but some hoped to drag the Hallfords to court and demand answers.

This wish also remained unfulfilled.

Jon Hallford, who is in custody, and Carie Hallford, who was released on bail, did not enter the civil suit and did not appear at the hearings, Swan said.

“I would have preferred if they had participated, if only because I wanted to call them to the stand, put them under oath and ask them how they came to do this not just once, not twice, but hundreds of times,” Swan said.

For Page, it felt like another slap in the face for the Hallfords.

More than 100 family members are listed in the civil suit, but the case was left open in case more victims come forward, as a total of 190 bodies were discovered on the funeral home’s grounds in Penrose, southwest of the company’s headquarters in Colorado Springs.

Jon Hallford is represented by the public defender’s office, which does not comment on cases. Carie Hallford’s attorney, Michael Stuzynski, could not immediately be reached for comment.

The case prompted Colorado state lawmakers to enact comprehensive regulations for the funeral industry, which had previously been among the most lax in the country.
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