A judge on Friday rejected a plea agreement for a Colorado funeral home owner who acknowledged abusing 191 corpses, after family members described the pain and shame they’ve carried since learning their loved ones’ bodies were left to rot.

The rare decision to reject the plea agreement that called for a 20-year prison sentence followed anguished testimony from family members seeking a more severe punishment.

For four years, Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a fraudulent scheme from their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs while maintaining a lavish lifestyle. They took money from customers for cremations, only to stash the bodies and give the families dry concrete resembling ashes.

Some of the victims’ families said the plea agreement would have essentially erased the crimes committed against the 191 people whose bodies were discovered in 2023 in a building in Penrose, Colorado. The agreement said Hallford’s state sentence was to run concurrently with a 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could have been freed many years earlier than if the sentences had run consecutively.

Colorado has struggled to effectively oversee funeral homes and, for many years, had some of the weakest regulations in the nation. It’s had a slew of abuse cases, including an estimated 20 decomposing corpses discovered this week at a funeral home in Pueblo.

Jon Hallford already is bound for prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. The rejection of the plea deal effectively resets the separate state criminal case. Hallford can now withdraw his guilty plea, sending the case to trial. He could also keep his guilty plea and let the judge sentence him without any guarantee of the outcome. He returns to court on Sept. 12.

Samantha Naranjo, whose grandmother’s body was found at the funeral home over a year after she died, said the judge acknowledged the experiences of families of the 191 people whose remains were identified -- and also of the relatives of the approximately 1,000 additional people whose remains were handled by the funeral home. Bentley said those people are considered potential victims even though the Hallfords were not prosecuted for how their remains were handled.

“I feel heard,” she said as tears welled up in her eyes.

Carie Hallford is accused of the same crimes as her husband and also pleaded guilty. Her sentencing on the corpse abuse charges has not been scheduled.

The couple was accused of letting 189 bodies decay. In two other instances, the wrong bodies were buried. Four remains were yet to be identified, the district attorney’s office said this week.

The Hallfords got a license for their funeral home in 2017, and authorities said the bodies started piling up by 2019. Some decomposed beyond recognition. Others were found unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.

AP Video by Thomas Peipert