A Colorado funeral home owner accused of improperly storing cremated remains and keeping a dead woman’s body in a hearse for over a year has pleaded guilty, prosecutors said.
Miles Harford, the former owner of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services, pleaded guilty on April 14 to one felony count of abuse of a corpse and one misdemeanor count of theft, according to Denver District Attorney John Walsh. Under the plea agreement, Harford will face up to 18 months in prison when he is sentenced on June 9.
Harford, 34, initially faced a total of 12 counts, including abuse of a corpse, forgery of a death certificate, and theft. Other charges were dismissed as part of the plea agreement, local television station KUSA reported.
Harford was arrested in February 2024 after Denver police discovered multiple boxes of cremated remains at a rental property, according to the Denver District Attorney’s Office. Police also found the remains of Christina Rosales, 63, in the back of a hearse on the property.
“Miles Harford was entrusted by friends and family of the deceased with providing professional and dignified cremation services,” Walsh said in a statement.
“He violated that trust in an unimaginably harmful way — robbing those friends and family of their peace of mind and opportunity to grieve. Mr. Harford is now accepting responsibility for those actions, which we hope will provide a measure of comfort to the friends and family of the deceased,” Walsh added.
Harford’s guilty plea follows a string of grisly funeral home incidents in Colorado in recent years, including a case involving owners who were accused of failing to cremate or bury nearly 200 bodies and giving fake ashes to families.
These families trusted a funeral home. Their loved ones were left to rot, authorities say.
Cremated remains found after homeowner evicted funeral home owner
On the morning of February 6, 2024, Denver police and medical officials responded to a home Harford was renting from. Police said the property owner had evicted Harford and reported finding boxes of cremated remains while cleaning the space.
The Denver Sheriff’s Department, which was previously present during the eviction, inspected the home and discovered a dead woman’s body as well as additional cremated remains inside the hearse on the property, according to Denver Police Commander Matt Clark.
At the time of the incident, Clark said the body was later identified as Rosales, who died in August 2022. Her family was informed about the discovery, and her remains were sent to the medical examiner’s office in Denver. The Denver District Attorney’s Office said Rosales’ body had been inside the hearse for about 18 months.
According to Clark, three dozen temporary urns were found inside the home, with some empty. He described the urns as “black plastic boxes similar to the size of a shoe box.” All recovered remains appeared to be people who died between 2012 and 2021, Clark said.
In addition to improperly storing the cremated remains, authorities said Harford gave some families remains that weren’t of their loved ones.
“Harford had given the Rosales family the cremated remains of a different person in place of Ms. Rosales, with the intention of making them believe that Ms. Rosales had been appropriately cremated,” the district attorney’s office said. “Further investigation discovered several other inappropriate funeral practices.”
‘Fix this problem’: Mishandled bodies, mixed-up remains prompt tougher funeral home regulations
Latest case involving Colorado funeral homes
For decades, Colorado had some of the weakest regulations on the funeral home industry in the U.S. The Coloradoan, part of the USA TODAY Network, previously reported that Colorado was the only state without licensing requirements for funeral industry workers.
In 2024, lawmakers in Colorado tightened regulations on the funeral home industry after several investigations into funeral homes across the state revealed that human remains were being mishandled. The legislation mandates the regulation and licensing of mortuary science practitioners, funeral directors, embalmers, cremationists, and natural reductionists.
The Colorado funeral home industry came under scrutiny after authorities discovered improperly stored bodies at a funeral home in Penrose, Colorado, a small town about 34 miles southwest of Colorado Springs, in October 2023. After obtaining a search warrant, the FBI, Colorado Bureau of Investigation, and local law enforcement found that about 190 bodies, which were in various states of decomposition, had been stored in the building.
Prosecutors later accused the funeral home owners, Jon Hallford and Carie Hallford, of defrauding families across the country by “not providing a cremation or burial for the deceased as promised.”
The Hallfords also allegedly gave families dry concrete instead of ashes, collected more than $130,000 from families for cremations and burials they never performed, and buried the wrong body on at least two occasions, according to prosecutors.
Earlier in 2023, the operator of another Colorado funeral home and her mother were sentenced to federal prison for illegally selling body parts or entire bodies without the consent of the family of the deceased, according to the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Colorado.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office announced in January 2023 that Megan Hess was sentenced to 20 years in prison, while her mother, Shirley Koch, got 15 years. Prosecutors said the two had pleaded guilty to one count of mail fraud and aiding and abetting for their involvement in stealing “the bodies or body parts of hundreds of victims, and then (selling) those remains to victims purchasing the remains for body broker services.”
Contributing: Anthony Robledo, USA TODAY; Natasha Lovato, Fort Collins Coloradoan
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Funeral home owner who kept body inside a hearse pleads guilty
