Officials in Colorado have released an arrest warrant for a former owner of a funeral home who they claim held the body of a dead woman in a coffin for 2 years at a residence where they also discovered the burned remains of at least thirty others.
The horrible find was made on February 6 while Miles Harford, the 33-year-old proprietor of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in the Littleton, Colorado, area, was being evicted from a home under court order, according to the police. The closure occurred in September of 2022.
It seems that Mr. Harford’s business ran into financial difficulties. Denver Police Cmdr. Matt Clark stated on Friday that there were occasions when he was unable to finish cremations and deliver the corpses to families for services.
He claimed that Harford occasionally gave relatives the ashes of someone else rather than their dear ones.
While a Denver sheriff’s deputy supervised the owner’s evacuation of Harford’s things, temporary coffins — plastic containers the size of a shoe box — were discovered in the crawl space of the home, according to Clark. There were empty crates among them.
Additional urns were discovered in a moving truck that was parked outside, and additional urns were discovered in a hearse that had the woman’s body wrapped in blankets, according to Clark. According to Harford, who is assisting authorities and is not at large, she passed away in August 2022.
According to him, the cremains that were found seem to belong to people who died between 2012 and 2021.
Colorado, which has some of the laxest regulations of the funeral business in the country, has seen several horrifying occurrences in recent years involving funeral home operators mishandling remains. This revelation is the most recent of these cases. There are no regular state inspections of funeral establishments or operator qualifications.
Following their detention, this past year for allegedly discarding more than 200 bodies throughout several years within a facility infected with bugs and providing false ashes to the deceased’s family, a married couple is currently facing trial in Colorado Springs. In the past year, federal prison terms were imposed on the owners of another funeral facility in Montrose, a city in western Colorado.