Two brothers who own a Colorado funeral home where two dozen bodies were found in various stages of decay were arrested on Thursday, nearly a year after state inspectors followed the smell of decomposition to a room hidden behind a cardboard display, according to investigators and state records.
The owners, Brian and Christopher Cotter, face more than 125 counts of state charges, including abuse of a corpse, forgery and theft, the 10th Judicial District Attorney’s Office said on Thursday.
Brian Cotter previously served as Pueblo County’s coroner but resigned shortly after the bodies were discovered during the inspection, according to the Pueblo County Board of Commissioners.
Their arrests, announced jointly by the judicial district and the Colorado Bureau of Investigation, grew out of a surprise on-site inspection in August last year at Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, Colo. Inspectors from the Colorado Office of Funeral and Mortuary Science Services encountered a strong odor inside the building, according to records from the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies.
The case is another troubling chapter for Colorado’s funeral industry. In February, a funeral home director, Jon Hallford, was sentenced to 40 years in prison after facing a slew of charges over storing at least 190 decomposing bodies while giving the families of the deceased fake ashes. His wife, Carie Hallford, was sentenced to 18 years in March, according to federal prosecutors.
The owner of another Colorado funeral home, Megan Hess, and her mother, Shirley Koch, were prosecuted in 2022 over accusations that her funeral home stole and sold body parts. In 2023, Ms. Hess was sentenced to 20 years in prison and Ms. Koch to 15 years, according to federal prosecutors.
In the new Davis Mortuary case, as the inspectors moved through the funeral home, the smell became more pronounced, according to the state records. They eventually noticed a doorway that was blocked by a cardboard display. After the display was moved, Brian Cotter asked inspectors not to enter the room beyond it, the records say, but the inspectors refused.
Inside, they found what the records describe as “several bodies in various stages of decomposition.” Some of the human remains had been waiting for cremation for as long as 15 years, Brian Cotter told inspectors, according to the records.
Investigators found 24 bodies at the funeral home, the authorities said during a news conference. They have identified 19 people so far from those remains.
“The evidence uncovered during this investigation reveals a complete disregard for the dignity of the deceased and a profound betrayal of the trust placed in Davis Mortuary by families in our community,” said Armando Saldate, director of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation.
A website for Davis Mortuary remained online on Thursday. The site described the funeral home as a family-owned business “serving the families of Pueblo, Colorado and the surrounding area continuously since 1905,” though it had been previously at another location in the same town.
The business’s site says it opened the first crematory in Southern Colorado in 1971. The brothers bought the mortuary in 1989, according to the site. “Brian and Chris Cotter are able to serve their friends and neighbors from throughout the region with compassion which is sometimes rare in the funeral business today,” the website says.
The phone number listed on the funeral home’s website is not operational, and no lawyers were listed for the owners on their court dockets.
A judge in Pueblo County set bail at $1 million each; as of Thursday, the Cotter brothers were not listed as being held at the county jail, according to its website.
The discovery of the remains raised the possibility that some families may not have received their relatives’ ashes from the funeral home. During the inspection, Brian Cotter told inspectors that he might have provided the wrong cremated remains to next of kin, the records said.
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