Colorado Springs, Colorado — Derek Johnson buried his mother’s ashes under a golden dewdrop tree with purple flowers at his home on Maui’s Haleakala volcano, fulfilling her wish for a final resting place overlooking her grandchildren.
Then the FBI called.
It was February 4, 2024, and Johnson was teaching an eighth-grade math class.
“Are you Ellen Lopez’s son?” one woman asked, Johnson recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.
The caller said there had been an accident, and an FBI agent would be flying in to explain it. Then I asked: “Did you use it?” Back to nature For the funeral home?
“Maybe you should Google them,” she added.
In the weight room, Johnson typed “Back to Nature” on his cell phone. Dozens of News reports Details appeared in a blur.
Hundreds of bodies piled on top of each other. An inch of decomposition fluid. Swarms of bugs. The investigators are shocked. The governor announces Emergency.
Johnson felt nauseous and his chest constricted, forcing him to breathe through his lungs. He pushed himself out of the building when another teacher heard his screams and came running.
Two FBI agents visited Johnson the following week and confirmed that his mother’s body was among 189 that Return to Nature’s owners, John and Carrie Halford, had hidden in a building in Colorado between 2019 and October 4, 2023, when the bodies were found.
It was one of The largest discoveries of decomposing bodies At a funeral home in the United States, lawmakers overhauled the state’s lax funeral home regulations. Besides handing over the fake ashes to the grieving families, the Halfords He also admitted to defrauding the federal government Of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid to small businesses.
Even as the Halfords’ bills went unpaid, authorities said they purchased Tiffany jewelry, luxury cars and laser body sculpting, taking about $130,000 from clients who paid for cremations.
They were arrested in Oklahoma in November 2023 and charged with abusing nearly 200 bodies.
Hundreds of families learned from officials that the ashes they scattered or kept near were not actually the remains of their loved ones. They were the bodies of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and infants Molded in room temperature building in Colorado.
John Halford Carrie Halford, who faces 30 to 50 years in prison, will be sentenced on Friday, in April after a trial by a judge. She accepted their plea agreements in December. Lawyers for John and Carrie Halford did not respond to an AP request for comment.
Johnson, 45, who has suffered from panic attacks since the FBI called, promised himself he would speak during Halford’s sentencing and is asking for the maximum sentence.
“When the judge announces how long you will serve in prison, and then you leave in handcuffs, you will hear me,” he said.
John and Carrie Halford were a husband and wife team that advertised “green burial” without embalming as well as cremation at Back to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.
She greeted grieving families, guiding them through their loved ones’ final journey. It was less visible.
Johnson called the funeral home in early February 2023, the week his mother died. Johnson said Carrie Halford assured him she would take good care of his mother.
Days later, she handed Johnson a blue box containing a plastic bag of gray powder, saying these were his mother’s ashes.
“She lied to me on the phone. She lied to me by email. She lied to me in person,” Johnson told the AP.
The next day, the box was surrounded by flowers and photos of Ellen Marie Shriver Lopez at a memorial service at a Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs.
Johnson sprinkled rose petals over it, as one preacher said: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”
On September 9, 2023, surveillance footage showed a man who appeared to be John Halford walking inside a building owned by Return to Nature in Penrose Township, outside Colorado Springs, according to an arrest affidavit.
Camera footage inside showed a body lying on a stretcher wearing a diaper and hospital socks. The man turned him onto the ground.
He then “appeared to wipe the remaining decomposition from the stretcher onto the other bodies in the room,” before moving what appeared to be two more bodies into the building, the affidavit said.
In a text message to his wife, Halford said: “While I was transferring, she got people juice from me,” according to the British newspaper “Daily Mail”. Court testimony.
Johnson grew up with his mother in an affordable housing complex in Colorado Springs, where she knew everyone.
Johnson’s father wasn’t around much. When Johnson was five years old, he remembers watching him punch his mother, sending her into the table, then into the guitar, breaking it.
It was Lopez who taught Johnson to shave and scream from the stands at football games.
The neighborhood kids called her “Mom,” and some of them would sleep on the couch when they needed a place to stay and a warm meal. She was talking to Jehovah’s Witnesses because she didn’t want to be rude. With a life spent in social work, Lopez would say, “If you have the ability and you have a voice to help: help.”
Johnson talked to his mother almost every day. After diabetes left her blind and bedridden at age 65, she asked Johnson to describe what her grandchildren looked like over the phone.
It was Super Bowl Sunday in 2023 when her heart stopped.
Johnson, who had come from Hawaii to be at her bedside, grabbed her warm hand and held it until it went cold.
Detective Sgt. Michael Jolliffe and Laura Allen, a deputy county coroner, stood outside the Penrose building on Oct. 3, 2023, according to the 50-page arrest affidavit.
There is a sign on the door that says “Back to Nature Funeral Home” and lists the phone number. When Jolliffe called him, he was disconnected. Cracked concrete and yellow grass stalks surrounded the building. In the back was a shabby carriage with an expired registration. The window air conditioner hummed.
Someone told Jolliffe that there was a foul odor coming from the building the day before, the affidavit said.
A neighbor told an AP reporter they thought it came from a septic tank. Another said her daughter’s dog always headed into the building when it escaped its leash.
It was reminiscent of spoiled manure or rotting fish, and would strike anyone downwind of the building.
Jolliffe and Allen spotted a dark spot under the door and on the stucco exterior of the building. They thought it looked like fluids they saw during investigations of decomposing bodies, the affidavit said.
But the building’s windows were covered and they could not see inside.
Allen contacted the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agency, which oversees funeral homes, which contacted John Halford. Halford agreed to bring an inspector inside the next afternoon.
Inspector Joseph Perry arrived, but Halford did not show up.
Perry found a small hole in one of the window coverings, the affidavit said. He looked through it and saw white plastic bags that looked like body bags on the floor.
A judge issued a search warrant that week.
Investigators donned protective suits, gloves, boots and respirators and entered the 2,500-square-foot building on Oct. 5, 2023, according to the affidavit.
Inside, they found a large bone grinder and next to it was a bag of Quikcrete, which investigators suspect was used to imitate ashes. The bodies were stacked in nearly a dozen rooms, including the bathroom, and the bodies were sometimes so high that they blocked doorways, the affidavit said.
There were 189.
Some had decomposed for years, others for months, according to the affidavit. Many were in body bags, some wrapped in sheets and tape. She added that others were half-exposed, on stretchers or in plastic bags, or were lying without any cover.
Investigators believe the Halfords were experimenting with cremating bodies with water, which can dissolve a body in several hours, the document said. There were swarms of insects and worms.
The body bags were filled with fluids, according to the affidavit. Some were torn. Five-gallon buckets were placed to catch leaks. She added that the removal teams “moved through layers of human decomposition on the ground.”
Investigators identified the bodies using fingerprints, hospital bracelets and medical cultures, the affidavit said. One body was supposed to be buried at Pikes Peak National Cemetery, she said.
Investigators extracted the wooden casket from the burial site of a US Army veteran who served in Vietnam and the Arabian Gulf. Inside was the deteriorating body of a woman, wrapped in duct tape and plastic sheeting.
The veteran’s body was discovered in the Penrose building covered in maggots.
After the FBI call, Johnson promised himself he would speak during the Halford family’s sentencing. But he found it difficult to talk about what happened even with close friends, let alone in front of the judge and Halford’s family.
For months, Johnson was obsessed with the case, reading dozens of news reports and often glued to his phone until one of his children interrupted to play.
When he closed his eyes, he said he imagined walking through the building with “maggots, flies, centipedes. There are mice, and they are feeding.” He asked a preacher if his mother’s spirit was trapped there. She reassured him that she had not done that. When an episode of the zombie show “The Walking Dead” came on, he collapsed.
Johnson began seeing a therapist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He joined Zoom meetings with relatives of other victims as the number rose from dozens to hundreds.
After identifying Lopez’s body, Johnson traveled in March 2024 to Colorado, where his mother’s remains were placed in a brown box at a crematorium.
“I don’t think you blame me, but I still want to tell you I’m sorry,” he recalled saying, placing his hand on the box.
Lopez’s body was then loaded into the crematorium and Johnson pressed the button.
Johnson has slowly improved with treatment, becoming more engaged with his students and children. He began practicing speaking in Halfords’ judgments in therapy. He closed his eyes and pictured standing in front of the judge – and Halfords.
“Justice is the missing part of this whole equation,” he said. “Maybe this justice will set me free in some way.”
“Then there’s a part of me that’s afraid it won’t happen, because it probably won’t.”