[ad_1]
The house owners of a US funeral dwelling have been accused of spending almost $900,000 (£723,000) in pandemic aid funds on issues corresponding to holidays, beauty surgical procedure, jewelry and cryptocurrency.
Jon and Carie Hallford, house owners of Return To Nature Funeral House in Colorado, already face greater than 200 prison costs linked to final yr’s discovery of 190 decaying our bodies in a bug-infested storage constructing.
These costs embrace corpse abuse, cash laundering, theft and forgery, together with allegations they gave households dry concrete as a substitute of cremated ashes, collected cash for burials and cremations they by no means supplied, and buried the unsuitable physique on two events.
Now they face 15 additional costs alleging they spent $882,300 (£708,000) in pandemic aid funds on gadgets together with two autos – a GMC Yukon and an Infiniti value over $120,000, journeys to California, Florida and Las Vegas, $31,000 in cryptocurrency, laser physique sculpting, and luxurious items from retailers corresponding to Gucci and Tiffany & Co.
The couple appeared in a federal courtroom on Monday, the place the prosecution argued they had been a flight threat, having fled to Oklahoma final October after the decaying our bodies had been discovered and once more earlier than their arrest on state costs in November.
The choose didn’t determine whether or not they need to be launched pending trial, as a substitute scheduling one other listening to for Thursday.
The invention of the 190 our bodies, a few of which had been there since 2019, shocked the state of Colorado, which has a few of the US’s weakest funeral dwelling laws.
Issues had been raised way back to 2020 in regards to the enterprise’s improper storage of our bodies however regulators didn’t act, permitting the variety of our bodies to develop to almost 200.
It was solely after neighbours complained in regards to the odor that authorities seemed extra carefully on the modest 2,500-square foot constructing in Penrose, about 30 miles south of Colorado Springs.
For the reason that our bodies had been found, dozens of households have been informed the ashes they got couldn’t have been the stays of family members.
[ad_2]
Source link