Abby Swoveland calls herself one of the lucky ones.

Her mom was a victim of the Return to Nature Funeral Home incident, in which 189 bodies were discovered, many deteriorating and some unidentifiable, in the Penrose facility last year. 

“I’m one of the lucky ones in that she was identified,” Swoveland told Colorado Politics Thursday.

Her mom’s body was left to rot at Return to Nature for two months, she said.

When the unanimous vote on House Bill 1335  was announced, Swoveland put her head in her hands, briefly, celebrating how lawmakers understood “the only way any good can come” from her experience is by making changes in the law.

“I was so relieved!” she said.

House Bill 1335 is one of three bills lawmakers are pushing this session to address the experience described by Swoveland and by many others — family members left to rot or body parts sold without their consent.

Notably, they are pushing for stricter state oversight – which they and other supporters of the measure said funeral homes have been without for years.

Reps. Matt Soper, R-Delta and Brianna Titone, D-Arvada, who sponsored the measure, have worked on funeral home issues over the past several years.

Colorado is slowing changing its laws to address that lack of oversight, beginning with HB 1335. The bill is a “sunset,” a measure designed to reauthorize the state’s oversight of an industry or occupation. In this case, the sunset being extended is the state’s mortuary science code, which deals only with the business side of the funeral industry. 

But the sunset, while seeking to reauthorize the mortuary science code until 2031, also intends to put more teeth into how the funeral home business is regulated, supporters said. 

Chief among the provisions in the bill is routine, periodic inspection of funeral homes, although what “routine” and “periodic” means is not defined in the bill and will be left to rulemaking by the Department of Regulatory Agencies. Those inspections can also take place once a funeral home’s registration has expired, which is what happened with Return to Nature. 

It’s only been recently that the department had the authority to inspect funeral homes at all, the result of a change in law in 2022 in the wake of what happened at the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, where the owners sold bodies and body parts without consent instead of cremating them. The owners, a mother and daughter, were both sent to federal prison.

Until 2022, DORA had to obtain permission to inspect a funeral home and the operator could say “no.” The 2022 law allowed inspections, but only during normal business hours. 

Lawmakers on the House Business Affairs and Labor Committee heard some of the stories from families tied to Return to Nature, as well as from professionals in the funeral home industry, who have been calling on the department for years to put in tighter regulations of the industry. Colorado is the only state in the nation that does not require its funeral home directors and related occupations to have any training in mortuary science. 

Javan Jones, who owns three funeral homes in northeastern Colorado, told the committee the inspections will give DORA the authority to “hopefully curb some of the problems that we have had that have arisen in the past couple years.”

The Colorado Funeral Directors Association “believes a more proactive inspection schedule will help curb some of the atrocities that have happened in the past recent years,” and allow the industry regain consumer trust and weed out the bad actors, Jones said. 

But does the bill go far enough?

Not according to Tonya Wilson, a retired U.S. Army captain whose mother was a victim of Return to Nature.

Wilson said periodic investigations should clearly be defined and annually conducted by trained individuals, and the statutes should allow for random visits.

“We cannot leave room for our lackadaisical approach to conducting inspections,” Wilson told the committee. 

Wilson also raised concerns about the department’s accountability on the issue.

“It’s crucial that the people of Colorado trust DORA to rigorously enforce this legislation without exception,” Wilson said, adding that should include more stringent requirements for DORA’s response to complaints. 

When her mother was finally identified and properly cremated, she and her brother were handed a biohazard bag. Inside that bag were two items: a Korean norigae, a kind of good luck charm, and a bracelet. The norigae was discolored and deteriorated from decomposition fluids, either from her mother’s body or someone who was stacked on top of her.

The bracelet, which her mother had worn from childhood, had bits of rotting flesh stuck inside the links of that bracelet, she said, adding, “This will haunt me for the rest of my life, and this should never happen to any family.”

While the bill wasn’t amended in committee, Rep. Chad Clifford, D-Littleton, indicated he would bring an amendment to shorten the sunset time to four years instead of seven to allow for a quicker review of the changes proposed in the legislation. 

HB 1335 now heads to the House Finance Committee.

Another sunset measure, House Bill 1254, would reauthorize state regulation of non-transplant tissue banks.

But it didn’t go far enough for its sponsors, Reps. Eliza Hamrick, D-Centennial and Brandi Bradley, R-Roxborough Park, who offered several amendments to boost the oversight of these facilities in a March 5 hearing with the House Health & Human Services Committee. 

Chief among the amendments — substantially increase the standards of practice for tissue banks and prohibit those who own funeral homes from holding a substantial interest in a tissue bank. 

The original bill from 2018 was also a response to Sunset Mesa, where bodies and body parts from 800 people were sold without the consent of the families. One of the owners of Sunset Mesa ran Donor Services, a body broker operation. 

“The necessity of this bill cannot be overstated,” Bradley told the committee. As non-transplant tissue banks grow in number, “the absence of comprehensive regulation poses risk to our constituents,” Bradley said, adding that HB 1254 is intended “to safeguard the health and wellbeing of Coloradans and the sacred deceased that they are trying to protect by ensuring these entities adhere to the highest standards of practice.”

Bradley addressed the financial concerns that led to the amendments.

A funeral home director who has a financial stake in a tissue bank has a financial incentive to sell a body for its valuable parts rather than provide an inexpensive burial, she said, citing a report from Arizona. 

Through sobs, Danielle McCarthy talked about her husband, David, who died in 2017. She was also one of the lucky ones, she said, as the FBI found her husband’s remains, which had been sold to a university for research without her consent.

“My husband was evidence for five years” and buried only recently, in 2023 at Fort Logan, she told the committee. 

HB 1254 won a unanimous vote and now heads to the House Appropriations Committee.