Police on Thursday arrested two Colorado men, including a former county coroner, for allegedly mishandling at least two dozen decomposing bodies and other remains found behind a hidden door in a funeral home.
Charges filed against former Pueblo County Coroner Brian Lee Cotter, 65, and his brother, Christopher Aaron Cotter, 60, included 125 counts of abuse of a corpse, according to a Colorado Bureau of Investigation statement. Police arrested the men in Pueblo, and they were jailed on $1 million bond.
The brothers are scheduled to appear in state court for the first time Friday afternoon in Pueblo, according to court documents.
The case began last summer when state inspectors arrived at Davis Mortuary in Pueblo, about 110 miles (177 kilometers) south of Denver. After entering the business owned by the two brothers, inspectors found remains behind a hidden door and reported a “strong odor of decomposition,” according to the CBI.
Brian Cotter served as Pueblo County coroner at the time of the discovery. The arrest marks the latest in a series of high-profile corpse-abuse cases in Colorado.
MSI previously reported that Colorado funeral home operator Jon Hallford was sentenced to 40 years in state prison in February for stashing 189 decomposing bodies in a building and giving grieving families fake ashes. His ex-wife, Carie Hallford, was later sentenced to 30 years for her role in the scheme.
Those cases helped spur Colorado lawmakers to require routine inspections of funeral home operations and adopt a funeral director licensing system — changes that had been absent when investigators found bodies left to decay in locations with lax oversight. The Hallford case also led to the unsealing of court documents showing that concerns about refrigeration at the funeral home had been raised to a state regulator as early as 2020, but the state had limited authority to inspect at the time.
The same year, the Colorado Bureau of Investigation opened a separate inquiry into 56 bodies found dumped at a Trinidad cemetery, a case that remains ongoing.
The Cotter brothers’ arrests follow a pattern of similar allegations at Colorado funeral homes that have drawn scrutiny to the state’s regulatory framework for the death-care industry.