Derrick Johnson buried his mother’s ashes beneath a golden dewdrop tree at his home on Maui, fulfilling her wish of a final resting place looking over her grandchildren.
Then, the FBI called.
It was February 4, 2024, and Johnson was teaching an eighth-grade gym class.
“Are you the son of Ellen Lopes?” a woman asked.
There had been an incident, and an FBI agent would fly out to explain, she said.
Then she said: “Did you use Return to Nature for a funeral home? You should probably google them.”
In the weight room, Johnson typed “Return to Nature” into his cellphone. Dozens of news reports appeared, details flashing on his screen in a blur.
Hundreds of bodies stacked on top of each other. Inches of body decomposition fluid. Swarms of bugs. Investigators traumatized. Governor declares state of emergency.
Johnson felt nauseated and his chest tightened, forcing the breath from his lungs. He pushed himself out of the building as another teacher heard his cries and came running.
Two FBI agents visited Johnson the following week, confirming that his mother’s body was among 189 that Return to Nature’s owners, Jon and Carie Hallford, had stashed in a Colorado building between 2019 and Oct. 4, 2023, when the bodies were found.
It was one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the U.S. Lawmakers overhauled the state’s lax funeral home regulations. And besides handing over fake ashes to grieving families, the Hallfords also admitted to defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid for small businesses.
Even as the Hallfords’ bills went unpaid, authorities said they bought Tiffany jewelry, luxury cars and laser-body sculpting, pocketing about $130,000 clients paid for cremations.
They were arrested in Oklahoma in November 2023 and charged with abusing nearly 200 corpses.
Hundreds of families learned from officials that the ashes they ceremonially spread or kept close weren’t actually their loved ones’ remains. The bodies of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and babies had moldered in a room-temperature building in Colorado.
