Colorado state inspectors discovered roughly 20 decomposing bodies stashed in a hidden room of a funeral home manned by a county coroner, according to authorities.
The corpses were found on Wednesday in a room behind a door that was concealed by a cardboard display during an inspection of Davis Mortuary in Pueblo.
Brian Cotter, an owner of the funeral home and the county coroner, had asked inspectors not to go inside the room, according to a document from state regulators.
The inspectors found a “strong odor of decomposition,” upon entering, the document said.
Cotter told inspectors that some of the bodies in the hidden room had been awaiting cremation for about 15 years, and that families may have been provided fake cremains of their relatives, according to the document.
“This is a profound violation of trust and a heartbreaking betrayal of the families who entrusted their loved ones to this funeral home,” Colorado Bureau of Investigation director Armando Saldate III said at a press conference Thursday.
“This is the day no one wants to see,” Saldate said. “We have received credible information that Davis Mortuary has been improperly storing human remains for years.”
The estimated 20 bodies were not immediately removed, and authorities have said they do not yet have a precise number of the dead.
“Our top priorities are to respectfully and humanely process the scene, identify all the deceased, and notify their families and loved ones. This will take some time, unfortunately,” Saldate told reporters.
Investigators collected evidence from Davis Mortuary on Thursday with the help of state troopers trained in responding to hazardous materials.
The funeral home has since been suspended over the grisly conditions.
The mortuary “engaged in willfully dishonest conduct and/or committed negligence in the practice of embalming, funeral directing, or providing for final disposition that defrauds or causes injury or is likely to defraud or cause injury,” said a summary suspension issued by DORA’s Office of Funeral and Mortuary Science Services.
“Davis Mortuary failed to embalm, refrigerate, cremate, bury, or entomb human remains within twenty-four hours after taking custody of the remains,” the suspension order, obtained by the Pueblo Chieftan, stated.
Cotter, a three-term Republican county coroner, has not been arrested. No charges have been filed as the “full-scale” investigation continues, according to Pueblo County District Attorney Kala Beauvais.
Cotter and his brother, Chris, bought the funeral home in 1989. Their father also owned and operated several funeral homes in Kansas, Nebraska, and Southern Colorado, according to the business website.
Colorado has long had some of the weakest oversight of funeral homes in the nation, with no routine inspections or qualification requirements for funeral home operators.
That has allowed numerous abuses, including a pending case involving nearly 200 decomposing bodies that were found stored at room temperature in a building just 30 miles away from Davis Mortuary.
Jon and Carie Hallford already faced more than 200 criminal counts for money laundering, forgery, theft, and corpse abuse over the shocking scenes found at their Back to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs.
They were hit with 15 federal charges in a new indictment last April that accused them of collecting over $130,000 from grieving families for cremations and burial services they never provided — instead allegedly handing over dried concrete instead of ashes and at least twice even burying the wrong bodies.
A sentencing in that case of one of the funeral home’s owners for corpse abuse is set for Friday.
“The good news is that we have some experience with this,” Saldate said, noting some investigators on the new case in Pueblo worked on the grim Back to Nature Funeral Home case.
The discovery in Pueblo came during the first inspection of Davis Mortuary under rules adopted last year in response to prior crimes within Colorado’s funeral industry.
The incident remains under investigation.
with Post wires
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