Earlier this month, the Denver Medical Examiner’s Office and the city’s police department received a call about a “suspicious occurrence” at a Denver house.

Authorities said the property owner had noticed boxes while cleaning the house after a tenant had been evicted.

Inside the boxes were the cremated remains of people. 

In the backyard, officers found a hearse, and, when they checked it, they uncovered the body of a woman covered in a blanket.

All told, more than 30 urns were found on the property, with dates ranging from 2012 to 2021, authorities said. 

The discovery in Denver occurred roughly four months after investigators with the Fremont County Sheriff’s Office discovered nearly 200 improperly stored bodies at the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose. That funeral home’s co-owners, Jon and Cari Hallford, are now facing more than 200 felony charges in the case. 

On Friday, the Denver police said they issued an arrest warrant for 33-year-old Miles Harford, the former owner of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in Littleton. Harford had rented the house in the 2500 block of South Quitman Street, where the cremated remains were found, authorities said. 

Authorities said he is being investigated for abuse of a corpse, forgery and theft.

Police believe Harford remains in the Denver metro area.

The property’s owner found the boxes of cremated remains in a crawl space, according to Major Crimes Division Commander Matt Clark.

Six other urns were found in a U-Haul on the property. Some of the urns were empty, according to Clark.  

And when officers moved an abandoned hearse from the backyard, they found the body of a 62-year-old woman, the police said. Authorities believe the body was stored in the hearse shortly after her passing. 

The Denver Office of the Medical Examiner identified the woman as Christina Rosales. She died of natural causes on Aug. 31, 2022 and was 62 at the time, the office said.

Rosales’ family told authorities that Harford provided them what they believed to be her cremains, which have since been handed over to the medical examiner.

The examiner’s office is now investigating databases to return the cremation remains to families, Clark said.

Officers warned that, because of the complexity of running DNA samples on cremated ashes, the examiner’s office can only go as far as examining records and labels to determine their identities.

Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services has been closed since September of 2022. The property owner of the former funeral home said there were no remains or suspicious materials in the building, according to investigators. 

Denver District Attorney Beth McCann said the theft and forgery charge deals with the alleged false death certificate related to the woman whose body was found inside the hearse and the the amount of money that Harford obtained from the family in “guaranteeing that he would then preform a cremation of the body, which we allege he did not do.” 

Along with the forgery, theft and abuse of the corpse charges McCann expects to file shortly, the district attorney said she anticipates other charges following investigation.

The police said Harford claimed he went through financial trouble at his business, leading him to storing the body and giving families alternate remains in lieu of those he couldn’t afford to cremate. 

Investigators also claimed that he owed money to crematories in the metro Denver area, with some banning him from transactions outright.

Investigators said some customers they contacted claimed to have ordered pieces of jewelry from Apollo Funeral but never received them.

Harford’s aunt, Donna Pilcher, said that she worked for the Apollo Funeral Home for six years until 2018 but had not spoken with Harford since.

“I am just shocked, surprised, sad and my heart goes out to all of the families,” said Pilcher.

She said that things “went down” for the business ever since COVID hit. She said that she has been talking with some of the families, whom she knew when she was working for Apollo Funeral Home. They were concerned that they may have received the wrong cremains of their loved ones.

“I cannot say that all the families I knew had correct cremains. I’ve just had a couple call me today and I confirmed that they do have their correct cremains,” she said.

“It truly breaks my heart that this has happened,” Pilcher said.

The case is unique and difficult because of the “complexity of the case, but also the concern and sensitivity for the families that have been impacted,” said Clark, the police commander.  

Denver investigators emphasized that the case is not related to the case in Penrose, where authorities discovered nearly 200 bodies after reported a foul smell coming out of a 2,500-square-foot building.

At the state Capitol, Colorado’s lawmakers are expected to tackle the regulation of the state’s funeral industry, though no proposal has been officially introduced as of Friday.   

Colorado is the only state out of the 50 that does not require its funeral home and crematorium employees to receive any kind of professional training or education.

Under current state law, there are no professional standards work in a funeral home or crematorium. Those facilities must be licensed as businesses, but that does not include any requirement about the experience or education of the employees.

In lieu of licensing, the Colorado Funeral Directors Association maintains credentialing offered through the Colorado Funeral Service Board, which is run by the association.

But that’s a private matter, and the state doesn’t require people who want to get into the funeral business to apply for those credentials.

Among the likely legislation is putting into place recommendations from a previously-scheduled sunset review of the industry that was issued on Oct. 13, a week after the nearly 200 bodies were found allegedly improperly stored at the Return to Nature facility in Penrose, a city about 100 miles from Colorado’s state Capitol in Denver.

The sunset review — the legislative process for considering regulations, which can lead to extending or even terminating an agency or program — deals only with regulations for the industry, but calls for licensure and better regulation have grown louder after the incident at the Return to Nature facility, which was already closed.

And likely topping that legislation list are licensure for practitioners and routine inspections. Lawmakers will also likely push for oversight to ensure that out-of-state entities that want to practice in Colorado are somehow vetted.

Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies, the state’s regulatory watchdog, has repeatedly rejected calls in the past for licensure or training for funeral service practitioners. The department persuaded then-Gov. Bill Owens to veto legislation in 2006 that would have put tougher standards in place for funeral service employees.

Authorities are asking any clients of Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services who did not receive the cremated remains of a loved one or experienced “any irregularity” to call the Denver police at 720-913-6610.

The building that housed the former Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services in Littleton is now a venue for weddings and memorial receptions, whose operator said Harford did not own the Littleton chapel at 13416 W. Arbor Place but rather leased it for funeral services and used it as his business address.

Gabrielle Oldfield said that her church, Discover Community Church, has owned the building for a year-and-a-half. Oldfield said that Harford stopped using the building six months before the church bought it. She often receives phone calls from Harford’s clients asking about funeral and cremation packages because they haven’t been able to find him, she said. 

“I feel so badly for all these families,” she said. 

Colorado Politics legislative reporter Marianne Goodland contributed to this report.