Colorado Deviancy, Part 1: Judge Rejects Plea For Mortician Who Abused 191 Corpses

A judge on Friday rejected a plea agreement for a Colorado funeral home owner who acknowledged abusing 191 corpses, after family members described the pain and shame they’ve carried since learning their loved ones’ bodies were left to rot.

The rare decision to reject the plea agreement that called for a 20-year prison sentence followed anguished testimony from family members seeking a more severe punishment.

Among them was Crystina Page, whose son David Jaxon Page, 20, was killed by police during a mental health crisis in 2019. His body languished in the funeral home for years as Page carried with her an urn that she wrongly thought contained her son’s cremated ashes.

“I loved it, I cried over it, I held it close during sleepless nights. I kissed him,” Page said. “It wasn’t him at all. … What happened to my son has broken me in ways I cannot repair.”

For four years, Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a fraudulent scheme from their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs while maintaining a lavish lifestyle. They took money from customers for cremations, only to stash the bodies and give the families dry concrete resembling ashes.

Page and others said the plea agreement would have essentially erased the crimes committed against the 191 people whose bodies were discovered in 2023 in a building in Penrose, Colorado. The agreement said Hallford’s state sentence was to run concurrently with a 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could have been freed many years earlier than if the sentences had run consecutively.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and, for many years, had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.