Owners of Colorado funeral home where 190 bodies were allegedly left to rot plead guilty

'The bodies were laying on the ground, stacked on shelves, left on gurneys, stacked on top of each other or just piled in rooms'

The owners of a Colorado funeral home accused of piling 190 bodies inside a room-temperature building and giving the grieving relatives fake ashes pleaded guilty Friday to corpse abuse as aggrieved families looked on in court.

Jon and Carie Hallford, who own the Return to Nature Funeral Home, began storing bodies in a decrepit building near Colorado Springs as far back as 2019 and gave families dry concrete in place of cremated remains, according to the charges. The grim discovery last year upended families’ grieving processes.