The authorities on Thursday arrested former Pueblo County Coroner Brian Cotter and his brother, Chris, and charged them with 125 counts of corpse abuse.

The arrests occurred nearly a year after the two came under the public spotlight when state inspectors found 24 decomposing bodies hidden inside a secret room at their privately owned funeral home, Davis Mortuary, in Pueblo. Brian Cotter resigned as coroner a short time later.

Investigators booked the Cotters into jail Thursday morning, said Armando Saldate, the director of the Colorado Bureau of Investigation. They are each being held on a $1 million cash, surety or property bond.

In addition to the corpse abuse charges, the Cotters face nine counts of forgery and over 25 counts of theft, 10th Judicial District Attorney Kala Beauvais said at a news conference Thursday afternoon.

The corpse abuse charges stem from the bodies found in the hidden room but also the buckets of cremains and human tissue found in the mortuary, meaning there are 125 victims in total, Beauvais said.

“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,” Saldate said.

The Cotters ‘killed’ a victim’s peace, she says

Prosecutors say the Cotters gave fake cremains to families who believed the urns contained the ashes of their loved ones.

Patty Emerson’s husband, Mel, was supposed to be cremated at Davis Mortuary after he died of kidney cancer in 2011. She was among the first to learn her husband was one of the bodies identified in the Cotter investigation.

“My first thought was, ‘Mel’s been gone for 14½ years. Certainly he’s not one of them,'” she told The Gazette on Thursday.

Her hopes crumbled when she got the call from Pueblo County investigators.

What came next was a flurry of emotions that took her all the way back to the day her husband passed.

“He (Brian Cotter) killed the tranquility, the peace and the acceptance that I fought for years to get after he died,” Emerson said.

After 10 months with no arrests, Emerson said she was starting to lose hope that anything would happen and that what happened to her husband would be forgotten.

News of the arrests offered Emerson a sense of relief, but there’s a fear of what comes next: the possibility of seeing what went on in that mortuary.

“Those kind of things send you on mind trips that you maybe don’t want to go down, but you kind of have to face the facts,” she said.

Recently identified bodies lead to new revelations

Dr. Gregory Grahek, the new Pueblo County coroner, and Fremont County Coroner Randy Keller have identified 19 victims since investigators discovered the remains in August 2025.

Investigators initially believed the bodies were of people who died between 2010 and 2012, but at least one of the recently identified bodies widened that time frame to as late as 2016, Saldate said.

Initially, the authorities said they would wait until they identified all of the victims before filing charges against the Cotters, but new information led them to believe that wouldn’t happen within a “reasonable amount of time,” Saldate said.

Investigators could not have pursued the theft and forgery charges without the identity of at least some of the victims, Beauvais said. The identification process also led investigators to other victims impacted by the mortuary.

Investigators continue to use DNA databases to identify the remaining bodies, Saldate said.

What’s next

Beauvais said she expects a lengthy court process.

The Cotters are scheduled to make their first appearance at the Pueblo County courthouse at 1:15 p.m. July 2, court records show.

Since the discovery, investigators have shut down Davis Mortuary and boarded up the building. A Gazette reporter went to the building on Thursday and saw that signage from the mortuary had also been removed.

Gazette reporter Cleo Westin contributed to this report.