The owner of a Colorado funeral home and his wife were arrested Wednesday after the decaying remains of at least 189 people were recently found at his facility.
The sheriff said the building is too hazardous to enter and would not describe what first responders saw.
Jon Hallford owns Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, a small town about 100 miles south of Denver. The remains were found Oct. 4 by authorities responding to a report of an "abhorrent smell" inside the company's decrepit building. Officials initially estimated there were about 115 bodies inside, but the number later increased to 189 after they finished removing all the remains in mid-October.
Relatives of people whose remains were handled by the funeral home have feared that their loved ones weren't cremated and were instead among the remains that authorities found. They said death certificates indicated the remains were cremated at one of two crematories, but both crematories told The Associated Press that they weren't performing cremations for Return to Nature at the time of the dates on the certificates.
The company, which was started in 2017 and offered cremations and "green" burials without embalming fluids, kept doing business even as its financial and legal problems mounted in recent years. The owners had missed tax payments in recent months, were evicted from one of their properties and were sued for unpaid bills by a crematory that quit doing business with them almost a year ago, according to public records and interviews with people who worked with them.
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