A judge has 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 issued Friday 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 incorrectly 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. 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. Jon Hallford already 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 now withdraw his guilty plea, sending the case to trial. He could also keep his guilty plea and let the judge sentence him without any guarantee of the outcome. He returns to court on Sept. 12.
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Some of the victims who filled the court seemed to brace themselves for the judge to accept the deal and then applauded when he announced his decision. Bentley said he had never rejected a plea agreement in his nine years on the bench and suggested he was swayed in 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," the judge said. Samantha Naranjo, whose grandmother's body was found at the funeral home over a year after she died, said Bentley acknowledged the experiences of families. "I feel heard," she said as tears welled up in her eyes.
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