PENROSE, Colo. — The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday began demolition of the Return to Nature Funeral Home, where 190 bodies were found improperly stored last year.
Before the first break, dozens of family members and local officials convened under a tent early Tuesday morning for a memorial service to honor the victims.
The building was a solemn sight for individuals including Samantha Naranjo, who were seeing the facility for the first time since getting a notification from the FBI that her grandmother was among those mistreated.
Owners Jon and Carie Hallford face hundreds of charges after the discovery in October of 190 bodies that had languished in the building since 2019. Fremont County Coroner Randy Keller said on Tuesday that 17 bodies remain to be identified, with DNA testing expected to take several more months.
“This is where she was for a whole year … just rotting in this building. It’s so hard to see it,” said Naranjo, while trying to process the range of her emotions.
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The grief was palpable, as tears flowed freely. Keller commended his team's efforts to identify each body and expressed hope that the demolition would offer some semblance of closure to the victims.
“This devastating event shook this community to its core," said Kevin Grantham, a Fremont County commissioner. "… There is almost no one in this entire community untouched by the horror you’ve experienced."
Naranjo greeted fellow victims as close friends. Like many others, she entrusted Return to Nature with a loved one's cremation. She combined the ashes provided by the funeral home with those of her grandfather and uncle in a jar she carried with her for a year.
“I'll forever have to carry around my grandfather and my uncle with cement mix concrete. For a year, I thought I was carrying her around,” said Naranjo, who thinks she was given concrete mix rather than her grandmother's ashes.
Naranjo now wears a locket with her grandmother's true cremains, which she received in December.
Throughout the day Tuesday, a crane excavator dismantled the funeral home, a process the EPA expects to span about 10 days.
While Naranjo acknowledged that the demolition marked a step forward in the quest for closure, she stressed the importance of preserving the site as a memorial for the affected families.
“I wouldn't know what to do if I heard that they were building something else on it," she said. "So for it to become something different than what it is now, besides a memorial site, would really hurt deeply."
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