It was almost midnight on a clear night in early April when police officer Chad Berry saw an unusual haze to the east in the town of Frederick.
He followed the haze in this small Weld County town until he got to the Greenwood & Myers Mortuary. A dark smoke was pouring out of a chimney used during cremations.
“I then observed a large amount of smoke coming from all four easement sides of the building,” Berry would write a few hours later in a police report.
He knocked on the mortuary doors, and called for backup when no one answered.
In a few hours, Berry would discover something that state regulators hadn’t noticed for months: the mortuary was operating both its cremations and its funeral services without valid licenses from the state or a certificate of occupancy for the building that was starting to burn.
But first, there was a fire to put out.
“The smoke is getting a lot bigger, and quicker and thicker,” an emergency dispatcher said over the radio at 11:25 p.m. on the night of April 12, 2023.
Firefighters arrived within minutes and started removing parts of the roof to find the source of the blaze.
They cut through a garage door to get into the building and used ladder trucks to attack the fire from the air.
The fire, which was found in the attic right against the flue from the cremation chamber, was put out early the next morning before it could spread to the bottom of the one-story building. State records show there were several bodies stored in an attached garage at the mortuary when the fire started. They had to be taken to other facilities in Boulder, Fort Collins and Greeley because of the incident. Firefighters also reported they removed human remains from the cremation chamber.
When the smoke cleared, the state ordered a halt to the mortuary’s operations in Frederick, and owner Michael Greenwood was charged in Weld County for operating without licenses. He’s due back in court in January.
The unlicensed cremations and funeral services at the Greenwood & Myers Mortuary in Frederick are just one of many examples of alleged misconduct at Colorado funeral homes that have gone unnoticed by state regulators until a series of complaints – or, in this case, smoke – invited scrutiny in recent months.
KUNC News’ Northern Colorado Center for Investigative Reporting requested and obtained documents, photographs and emergency radio recordings that reveal why the state forced the Boulder-based Greenwood & Myers Mortuary to stop working in Weld County after the fire.
Those documents show that as the Frederick fire at the mortuary was investigated, police and firefighters both noticed the stop work notice that the town’s building department had posted on the front door of the mortuary just a week before the fire. Towns issue stop work notices when certain safety conditions haven’t been met. In this case, it was for drainage issues and the lack of a screen on the mortuary roof.
“A certificate of occupancy could not be issued until certain items were completed, inspected and passed,” Frederick town spokesperson Renae Lehr said last week. “They were out of compliance.”
After police called state regulators on April 13 to report the fire, the state immediately sent owner Michael Greenwood a cease and desist order.
“It raises questions,” Lehr said of the incident.
Greenwood & Myers started in Boulder and has won the Boulder Daily Camera’s people’s choice award for best mortuary 13 years in a row. The awards market the winners as “the crème de la crème” of service providers in the community.
The Boulder location has an active funeral home license and no record of disciplinary action, according to state records.
The mortuary held a ribbon cutting ceremony for its new Frederick location in April 2022. The business obtained licenses from the state for the new crematory and funeral home at the time, but they expired in November 2022.
Greenwood & Myers’ owner, Michael Greenwood, didn’t respond to multiple requests from KUNC News to talk about the fire and what happened after it. A receptionist at Greenwood & Myers Boulder location said Monday afternoon he was too busy for an interview.
State records show the licenses at the Frederick location are still expired. The town's stop work notice is also still in effect.
Warning signs
The public documents KUNC News obtained through a series of records requests raise other concerns about the fire.
The fire and police reports from the town of Frederick reveal there were some potential warning signs about the facility in the months and hours leading up to the blaze.
Investigators said hours before the fire started, a person who was doing a cremation at the mortuary had to do a manual reset of one of the cremations because the machine automatically stopped and wasn’t operating normally. After the fire took place, investigators also received a video a passerby took three months before the fire showing flames shooting out of the smokestack of the mortuary.
“Based on the manufacturing specifications, if flame was observed from the retort flue, malfunction of the (cremation) unit was possible,” fire investigators wrote in their report.
Police said in their report that Greenwood told them no cremations were happening at the Frederick mortuary the day of the fire. That statement was contradicted by fire investigators. They interviewed someone from another mortuary who said there were cremations happening at Greenwood & Myers in Frederick on the day of the fire.
While investigators haven’t announced a definitive cause of the fire, they said in a report a possible malfunction of the human cremation chamber was “a plausible” cause. They ruled out other potential causes, including weather, electrical issues and arson.
Meanwhile, complaints have led state regulators to take action against several other funeral homes and crematoriums across Colorado in recent months.
'My heart breaks'
Inside a clunky, hard to navigate government database are hundreds of documents that detail allegations against funeral homes and what the state did about them.
In May, state regulators suspended the license of the McCoy Family funeral home registered in Windsor, alleging it was using subcontractors to provide funeral services without telling clients. The funeral home was registered to a home address that “does not provide funeral goods or services,” regulators alleged.
In September, regulators sent a “letter of admonition” to the Ballard Family Mortuary in Denver after it allegedly failed to release the remains of someone.
“Refusing to promptly release human remains whether or not any costs have been paid violates the Mortuary Sciences Code,” regulators wrote.
And this month, regulators suspended the license of The Denver Cremation Company after a complaint led investigators to find bodies were being stored in a “plywood framed room” cooled by window frame air conditioners set to the lowest temperature setting.
State lawmakers say the incidents are examples of what can happen in Colorado’s lax regulatory environment for funeral homes, which don’t undergo routine inspections or have licensing requirements for individual workers.
State Sen. Dylan Roberts represents a West Slope district where funeral home operators have faced criminal charges for the mistreatment of bodies. When KUNC told Roberts about the fire at the Frederick facility and the lack of licensing, he said it was another example that adds a sense of urgency to his push to tighten regulations on the industry next year.
”When you put yourself out there as a business, to customers, there should be some level of expectation that you're playing by the rules in order to protect public safety,” Roberts said. “My heart breaks for the families that are impacted by this, and it makes you kind of upset to think that families are having their loved ones mistreated or activities misrepresented at such a sensitive time of losing a loved one.”
Roberts said families are vulnerable when they’re choosing who to do business with because they’re busy grieving.
“The last thing on their minds is, ‘Is this a reputable business?’” he said.
Roberts said he’s planning to file a bill next year that would add new regulations for individual workers in the funeral home industry.
“We need to be making sure employees are qualified to be working there,” he said.
Few inspections
Several other states, including Texas, have for many years required regular funeral home inspections. In some states, that’s a requirement to get a license.
Colorado, however, does not do regular inspections of funeral homes. Instead, the state relies on a complaint system to prompt investigations. In response to several high profile criminal cases at funeral homes, Colorado passed a new law last year allowing regulators to inspect funeral homes and crematoriums without getting the business owners’ permission first. But a report released this month reveals regulators are rarely using that power.
The state reports it performed nine inspections between January 1 and August of this year. Last year, Colorado spent $74,222 on the equivalent of one-quarter of a full-time employee to regulate 220 funeral homes and 77 crematories.
Roberts said the current system isn’t working.
“What’s happened over the last four to five years in Colorado is certainly adding urgency to this,” he said of the need for new regulations.
Allegations of nearly 200 bodies being improperly stored at the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colorado, have brought a new level of scrutiny to Colorado’s lax regulations on the industry.
KUNC is continuing to investigate the regulatory environment around funeral homes, requesting records and digging through state databases to learn more about alleged misbehavior in northern Colorado. This story is part of continuing coverage.
