LITTLETON, Colo. — The day before gruesome news broke of a decomposing woman’s body found during an eviction of a former funeral director, Suzanne Ball got a strange phone call.
She said someone from Colorado’s Department of Regulatory Agencies called her and asked if she ever got the cremated remains of her mother who died in November 2021.
It was the first time in years she had heard from DORA after she filed a complaint about the funeral director who handled her mother’s remains: Miles Harford.
“DORA called us the day before I saw your story and asked us if we ever got her ashes back,” Ball told 9NEWS Friday. “So I really don’t understand what DORA did.”
Harford faces charges for abuse of a corpse, forgery and theft. He was arrested Thursday in Englewood and appeared remotely before a Denver judge on Friday morning. The judge granted Harford a personal recognizance bond, which didn’t require him to pay any money to be released from jail.
Ball said she picked Harford’s company, Apollo Funeral and Cremation Services, from a list her mother’s hospice provider gave her. She said Harford picked up her mother’s body from her memory care like he was supposed to around the time she died on Nov. 2, 2021.
“After a week or two one of my friends said this is odd that you haven’t heard from him,” she said. “(Harford) texted me back and said ‘well it’s the holiday season and COVID so things take longer.’”
Ball said this went on for weeks. Each time, she said, Harford had a different excuse.
“My sister ended up calling the police and doing a report and they ended up calling us back and said well this is a civil matter,” she said.
An officer did go to Harford’s Littleton office, but never found him, Ball said. Her sister’s call was one of two to the police department in early 2022 about concerns with Harford’s business. In another call, a client said she wondered if she really had her husband’s remains.
“We tried Tri-County Health to see if we could get the death certificates — they acknowledged they knew who Miles was but we can’t as a family get the death certificates,” she said.
Finally, after Christmas of 2021, nearly two months after her mother died, Ball said she remembers that Harford told the family his assistant would meet them to give them her mother’s death certificate.
“This lady was there, happened to be his mom, and all she had were the death certificates, and she said ‘I don’t have your mom… Miles will bring her to you later and we were like, that’s really not acceptable’,” Ball said.
Finally, Harford shared the name of a crematorium.
“We called them and they say ‘oh yeah, we’ve had your mom for six weeks, we just don’t have your contact information’,” she said.
“It was weeks of not knowing where she was. It was a lot of stress on the family.”
Ball said after they got her mother’s remains, the family filed a complaint with DORA. An investigator called back and assured the family they were looking into her mom’s case, but couldn’t reveal any details of the investigation to them.
Records of Harford’s Funeral Home and Cremation license, which expired later that year, show no signs of any disciplinary actions. The agency refused a 9NEWS request for records relating to Harford’s license, citing a provision of open records law that protects “ongoing civil or administrative investigations conducted by the state.”
“The only time that Miles called me back after the original contact was he called to ask if we would take back the DORA complaint,” Ball said. “I said no we’re not going to do that, Miles.”
“The fact that he was still in business after our ordeal…it’s just amazing to me.”
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