The former Denver funeral director who admitted to abusing corpses after the police found around 30 cremated remains and a corpse that had been in his hearse for months at his home last year will spend more than a year in prison. 

Denver Judge Jay Grant sentenced 34-year-old Miles Harford to 18 months in prison and one year of parole on one count of abusing a corpse and a misdemeanor theft charge on Monday afternoon — the maximum sentence for those charges.

Harford pleaded guilty to the charges in April, with 10 charges dropped in the deal.

Harford appeared well-dressed in the courtroom, donning a burgundy suit and black glasses. He looked straight at each speaker, victims’ family and friends. He showed no expression.

The prosecution pointed out that there were countless people watching the court case online and in the room, including multiple members of the Denver Police Department and District Attorney John Walsh.

“There is something different about this case. There’s a feeling that’s different. I think it’s because it’s primal,” Chief Deputy District Attorney Jake Friedberg said of the rituals for honoring a human after death. “It goes to the very core of our species. This is a need baked into humanity. We have to do this. It’s part of our basic programming.”

“I think these cases pose a really difficult situation for the law,” Walsh said after the hearing. “It’s not a violent crime, and, yet, it has a violent effect on the emotions of the families.”

The Englewood Police Department arrested Harford on Feb. 27, 2024 — weeks after a set of events shocked the metro Denver area and appalled customers of Harford’s former business, Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services. 

The Denver Medical Examiner’s Office and the Denver Police Department received a call about a “suspicious occurrence” at a house in a residential area of southwest Denver on Feb. 6, 2024. 

The property owner was cleaning the house following Harford’s eviction and found 29 different urns of cremains. 

Investigators then got to the home and started searching the property, later finding Christina Rosales’ body covered in rugs in the back seat of Harford’s broken-down hearse. The long white vehicle was parked in a side driveway at his Denver home.

Rosales had been picked up in late 2022. Harford was then turned down by crematories due to an ongoing debt bill. Instead, Harford covered the body and left it in the hearse until it was discovered during the eviction.

“For 18 months, he left her in that car in the heat of the summer and the cold of the winter,” Christina Rosales’ husband, George Rosales, told the court. “I can’t understand how he can treat her body that way. He truly was a monster.”

Along with the abuse of Rosales’ body, Harford was also taking money from people for prepaid cremation services and providing other families with the wrong cremains.

Some of the incidents occurred as early as May 2019, and others started in August 2023 — six months before the police discovered a body and cremains on the property of the house Harford rented.

“What he was going to do was defraud the people who had already prepaid him for funeral services. He was going to give them the remains of other, unrelated people. He did this to represent to them, falsely, that he had completed the contract,” Senior Deputy District Attorney Kate Horton said.

In one instance, for example, Harford gave fraudulent remains to a father who then spread the ashes at different spots around the country. The father didn’t find out till after the arrest that the remains were not of his son, according to Horton.

“If not for this eviction, would my mother ever have been returned to us?” asked Molly Rosales, whose family was given the wrong ashes after her mother’s 10-year battle with dementia, Alzheimer’s and death.

The incident — along with the 2023 case at a funeral home near Colorado Springs, where deputies discovered nearly 200 improperly stored bodies at the Return to Nature Funeral Home — eventually led to Gov. Jared Polis signing Senate Bill 173 into law in 2024. That law requires funeral industry professionals to apply, pay an application fee, pass a criminal history check and not be subject to discipline in another state in order to work in Colorado. Those regulations go into effect Jan. 1, 2027.

Harford started the funeral service in 2012 and eventually closed it in 2022 due to ongoing debt. He could not afford to pay for the cremations of his clients, according to prosecutors, so he started shifting around the cremains given to customers.

Harford’s defense attorney, Clarke Cooper, claimed that the issues started from “extreme” substance abuse — especially alcoholism — that stemmed from the deaths of his grandmother and, later, his best friend in 2019.

Harford began crying. He had shown no emotion throughout the hearing.

“There is an undertone of significant substance abuse,” Cooper told the judge. “Mr. Harford has not shied away from this.”

He added: “Mr. Harford is not here to do anything but accept accountability for his actions.”

“This is a young man who almost has no real relationship with the truth. I think he’s a conman,” prosecutor Friedberg said, claiming that Harford never took full responsibility and has often lied during the investigation process.

The defense argued that Harford was drunk during the investigation, leading to his lack of accountability. He is now clean, the defense said. 

Friedberg also pointed toward two new felony charges out of Arapahoe County in January, in which Harford allegedly hacked into his former employer’s business account to pay his own Verizon bill.

Det. Steven Seidel, who headed the investigation, claimed that Harford never showed remorse throughout the process.

According to Seidel, investigators even found a video on his phone where he was lip-syncing to “The Bones” by Maren Morris outside of the hearse.

“His actions definitely brought up memories for these families. Definitely brought up the thoughts, but they are contradictory to the thoughts and memories of what these families wanted,” Seidel said. “They now have thoughts and memories of whether or not their loved ones are at home on their mantle.”

Harford called the period the “darkest time of his life,” as he apologized to the families Monday.

He added that the repeated exposure to loss, especially deaths in his own family, caused him to burn out.

“Feeling this way, nobody wins,” he said. “I don’t intend to return to the funeral industry, but I do intend to be a voice of positive and meaningful change for the funeral industry.”

Harford went on to say that investigators made him out to be a bad guy and cornered him without counsel at the beginning of the investigation process. 

“A bad guy doesn’t sober up so that he can be his best self as he addresses the cases before him,” Harford said. “A bad guy doesn’t have perfect compliance with pre-trial for over a year. A bad guy doesn’t show up to every court appearance on time to sit and wait for the DA to show up whenever they might feel like it.”

Victim families shook their heads on the benches.

Grant, the judge, said he hopes the sentence does not define Harford as a person and told the families that they deserve justice.

“The trauma that Mr. Harford’s actions caused were not only profound, but lasting. Punishment is not only appropriate, but necessary,” he concluded.

“He never apologized until today,” George Rosales said after the sentencing. “He apologized to the court. He didn’t apologize to us. I forgive him in my heart. I hate to hold that burden and that hatred in my heart.”