Colorado judge rejects plea deal for funeral director

ABUSED CORPSES

Crystina Page, back, hugs a well-wisher Friday outside the El Paso County Courthouse in Colorado Springs after a judge rejected a plea deal in the case of a funeral home owner who stored approximately 189 decomposing bodies in a building. DAVID ZALUBOWSKI — THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

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By Colleen Slevin, Matthew Brown and Jesse Bedayn

The Associated Press

COLORADO SPRINGS>> 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 essentially would have erased the crimes committed against the 191 people whose bodies were discovered in 2023 in a building in Penrose. 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 oversee funeral homes effectively and for many years had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. The state has had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered at a funeral home in Pueblo.

Jon Hallford is bound for prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. The rejection of the plea deal effectively resets the separate state criminal case. Hallford can withdraw his guilty plea, sending the case to trial. He also could keep his guilty plea and let the judge sentence him without any guarantee of the outcome. He returns to court Sept. 12.

Some of the victims who filled the court seemed to brace themselves for the judge to accept the deal and applauded when he announced his decision.

Bentley said he had never rejected a plea agreement in his nine years on the bench and called it an “extreme action by the court.” He suggested he was swayed after listening to Friday’s testimony.

“I heard an overwhelming perception that the justice that had been worked out between the attorneys was justice that did not accurately reflect the truth of the victims’ experiences,” Bentley said.

The prosecutor, Rachael Powell, had argued that a 20-year sentence was appropriate because abuse of a corpse is the least serious type of felony under the law, with a possible sentence ranging from probation to a maximum of up to 18 months in prison.

Defense attorney Adam Steigerwald said a trial would not deliver what family members wanted.

“The answers the people are looking for, sadly, are not satisfactory, and they largely don’t exist,” he said.

Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled.

The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances, the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains were yet to be identified, the district attorney’s office said this week.