I wore my mom’s ashes around my neck. Then I found out her abandoned body was decomposing in a funeral home

The latest headlines from our reporters across the US sent straight to your inbox each weekday Your briefing on the latest headlines from across the US Please enter a valid email address Please enter a valid email address SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. “State officials haven’t regularly inspected funeral homes and only devoted one-quarter of one full-time position to regulate 220 funeral homes and 77 crematories.” “Colorado was, if not the, probably the most lax in the country,” said Farmer, noting the “potential for those bad actors and bad things to happen.” The Return to Nature scandal was neither the first nor last in recent years highlighting the pitfalls of the state’s dearth of regulation – with offenses ranging from selling body parts to stashing bodies and cremains in residential crannies. Hess, it continued, would meet promise to complete cremation services and return cremains to loved ones – but instead the Sunset Mesa operator “and others would harvest body parts from, or prepare the entire bodies of, the decedents for sale in body broker services.” Soper liaised with many families devastated by the Sunset Mesa case, recalling: “Almost every victim described it the same way – and that was as a ‘second death’.” More Colorado families, however, were destined to suffer that same re-victimization. Republican Colorado State Rep. Matt Soper and Democratic Sen. Dylan Roberts appear at a March news conference to unveil bipartisan legislation to license funeral home professionals in Colorado; Soper tells The Independent that, when he first began delving into the issue, ‘I could not believe how few rules there were in this space’ Prosecutors revealed texts in court between the owners in which one suggested disposing of bodies “by digging a big hole and treating them with lye or setting them on fire,” according to The AP. “It feels like the culmination of a legislative lifetime’s worth of work have completely reformed the industry, both criminal laws, business laws, civil laws and regulatory laws, to be able to really save the industry in Colorado and to prevent future victims.” Loved ones of Karan Lea Blue, pictured, were already grieving when the scandal hit and not only traumatized them but served as a constant reminder of loss, her daughter tells The Independent, adding:‘I just hope that rules and regulations are put into place and they realize that, even though that person is not in that body anymore, it still affects the people that loved them’ Countless families, meanwhile – like Makayla mourning her mom Karan – continue to grapple with the pain lax regulations caused them.