Top inset: Christina Rosales (KCNC). Bottom inset: Miles Harford (Arapahoe County Sheriff). Background: The hearse that contained Rosales’ body (KDVR).
A former Colorado funeral homeowner is accused of keeping a woman’s corpse in a hearse in his backyard for over a year and hoarding the remains of over 30 cremated people.
Miles Harford, 34, faces charges of forgery, abuse of a corpse and theft, authorities said.
The case first came to light on the morning of Tuesday, Feb. 6, when personnel from the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office and the Denver Police Department were called to a house regarding a suspicious occurrence.
The reporting person had been cleaning the residence after evicting Harford when the property owner found boxes of cremains and reported the discovery to deputies who were at the location for the eviction, police said.
While processing the scene, investigators found a hearse parked on the property. Inside on a gurney under blankets was the body of a dead woman — coroner’s tag still attached.
The body was identified as belonging to Christina Rosales, who died of Alzheimer’s disease at age 63 in August 2022 and had been hidden in the hearse since that time. Authorities said they also found 35 cremated remains of people who died between 2012 and 2021 stashed throughout the property, from inside the hearse to a crawlspace.
Rosales’ family told investigators that Harford, who owned the shuttered Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services, had previously provided them with what they believed to be the cremains of their loved one.
Rosales’ family had gone to Harford because he knew Rosales through the middle school he attended as a student and where she worked in the kitchen.
“The image of her in the back of a car treated like a dog just in blankets. It just … it angers me,” Rosales’ husband, George Rosales, told local CBS affiliate KCNC. “She really liked him and he promised he would take care of her.”
Rosales was a loving mother to two children, her sisters said.
“Knowing that she just sat there for a year and a half breaks my heart,” Rosales’ twin sister, Cathy Vorndran, told local NBC affiliate KUSA.
Vorndran said she was heartbroken because the two had known each other for years.
“He was a student there, and he would come in and wash trays, and she would give him lunch, and whenever he was done, she’d go, ‘Miles, sit down, eat something,’ and ‘we’ll see you tomorrow,’” Vorndran told KUSA.
Vorndran said Harford remembered her sister when they made the arrangements.
“I just assumed he was going to do everything right,” she said. “He had a three-piece suit on and says ‘Cathy, I’m going to do your sister so proud because I loved her so much.’ And I was so relieved to know that I thought, ‘She’s in good hands.’ I wanted nothing but the best for her.”
This is not the first such tragedy involving mismanagement and mistreatment of human remains in the funeral home industry in Colorado, which had been the only state in the nation without licensure for directors and employees of the funeral industry until this year when the governor signed a pair of bills into law.
Harford was originally scheduled to appear for arraignment and enter a plea on Friday, but after prosecutors and defense lawyers huddled with the judge briefly before the scheduled proceedings, the hearing was rescheduled for Dec. 9.
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