The house owners of a US funeral house have been accused of spending almost $900,000 (£723,000) in pandemic aid funds on issues equivalent to holidays, beauty surgical procedure, jewelry and cryptocurrency.
Jon and Carie Hallford, house owners of Return To Nature Funeral Residence in Colorado, already face greater than 200 prison prices related to final yr’s discovery of 190 decaying our bodies in a bug-infested storage constructing.
These prices embody 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 incorrect physique on two events.
Now they face 15 additional prices alleging they spent $882,300 (£708,000) in pandemic aid funds on objects together with two automobiles – a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti value over $120,000, journeys to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency, laser physique sculpting, and luxurious items from retailers equivalent to Gucci and Tiffany & Co.
The couple appeared in a federal courtroom on Monday, the place the prosecution argued they had been a flight threat, having fled to Oklahoma final October after the decaying our bodies had been discovered and once more earlier than their arrest on state prices 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.
The invention of the 190 our bodies, a few of which had been there since 2019, shocked the state of Colorado, which has a few of the US’s weakest funeral house rules.
Issues had been raised way back to 2020 in regards to 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 in regards to the scent that authorities appeared 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 instructed the ashes they got couldn’t have been the stays of family members.
