By COLLEEN SLEVIN, MATTHEW BROWN and JESSE BEDAYN, Associated Press

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — It’s been two years since nearly 200 decaying bodies were discovered throughout a fetid, room temperature building in rural Colorado. On Friday, the man responsible, a funeral home owner, is set to be sentenced in state court for 191 counts of corpse abuse.

Jon Hallford and his wife, Carie, ran a morbid racket for four years out of their Return to Nature Funeral Home in Colorado Springs: assuring people they were handling loved ones’ cremations only to stash the bodies in a bug-infested building and give them dry concrete resembling ashes.

Jon Hallford is already headed to prison after pleading guilty to federal fraud charges. Friday’s sentencing hearing will focus on state charges related to mistreatment of the bodies. Family members will have the chance to describe the anguish of learning a loved one slowly decayed among piles of others.

FILE – This image provided by the Muskogee County, Okla., Sheriff’s Office shows Jon Hallford, who was arrested, along with Carie Hallford, the owners of a Colorado funeral home Wednesday, Nov. 8, 2023, in Oklahoma, on charges linked to the discovery of multiple sets of decaying remains at one of their facilities. (Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)

“To me it’s the heart of the case. It’s the worst part of the crime,” said Tanya Wilson, who is traveling from Georgia to speak at the sentencing. She hired the funeral home to cremate her mother and later discovered the supposed ashes the family spread in Hawaii weren’t from her mother’s body, which had been wasting away in the building in Penrose, a small town 35 miles from Colorado Springs.

A plea agreement calls for Hallford to receive a 20-year prison sentence for the corpse abuse charges.

Some families who were victims in the case want Judge Eric Bentley to reject the agreement because Hallford’s state sentence is expected to run concurrently with his 20-year federal sentence, meaning he could be freed many years earlier than if the sentences ran consecutively.

“The scale of this is staggering. Why does the state believe they deserve a plea deal?” Wilson asked. “There needs to be accountability.”

FILE – A hearse and van sit outside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo., on Oct. 6, 2023. (AP Photo/David Zalubowski, File)

If the court rejects the agreement, Hallford could withdraw his plea agreement and go to trial, Bentley said to a packed courtroom as Friday’s hearing got underway. The judge cautioned family members objecting to a plea deal that they could be “opening Pandora’s box” since a trial would drag out the case for many months and extend their grief.

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.

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. Many languished for years in states of decay, some decomposed beyond recognition, some unclothed or on the floor in inches of fluid from the bodies.

As the gruesome count grew, Jon and Carie Hallford were also defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in COVID-19 era aid.

With the money from families and the federal government, the Hallfords bought ritzy items from stores like Tiffany & Co., a GMC Yukon and Infiniti worth $120,000 combined, laser body sculpting and $31,000 in cryptocurrency.

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In 2023, a putrid smell poured from the building and the police turned up. Investigators swarmed the building, donning hazmat suits and painstakingly extracting the bodies. Hallford and his wife were arrested in Oklahoma, where Jon Hallford had family, more than a month later.

Families learned that their cathartic moments of grief — spreading a mother’s ashes in Hawaii or cradling a son’s urn in a rocking chair — were tainted by a deception. It was as if those signposts of the grieving process had been torn away, unraveling months and years of working through their loved ones’ deaths.

Some had nightmares of what their relatives’ decayed bodies must have looked like. Others were anguished by the fear their family members’ souls were trapped, unable to go free.

A mother, Crystina Page, demanded to watch as her son’s body, rescued from the Return to Nature building, was cremated for real. Wilson, who had thought she already spread her mother’s ashes in Hawaii, said the family cremated her mother’s remains after they were recovered by authorities. She is waiting for the court cases to conclude before returning to Hawaii again to spread the ashes.

Brown reported from Billings, Montana.

By KONSTANTIN TOROPIN, Associated Press

WASHINGTON (AP) — Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has ordered that National Guard troops patrolling the streets of Washington for President Donald Trump’s law enforcement crackdown will be armed, the Pentagon said Friday.

The Defense Department didn’t offer any other details about the new development or why it was needed.

National Guard soldiers salute as the motorcade carrying President Donald Trump, passes by near the White House, Thursday, Aug. 21, 2025, in Washington. (AP Photo/Jacquelyn Martin)

The step is a escalation in Trump’s intervention into policing in the nation’s capital and comes as nearly 2,000 National Guard members have been stationed in the city, with the arrival this week of hundreds of troops from several Republican-led states.

Trump initially called up 800 members of the District of Columbia National Guard to assist federal law enforcement in his bid to crack down on crime and homelessness in the capital. Since then, six states have sent troops to the city, growing the military presence.

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It was unclear if the guard’s role in the federal intervention would be changing. The guard has so far not taken part in law enforcement but largely have been protecting landmarks like the National Mall and Union Station and helping with crowd control.

The Pentagon and the Army said last week that troops would not carry guns. The new guidance is that they will carry their service-issued weapons.

The city had been informed about the intent for the National Guard to be armed, a person familiar with the conversations said earlier this week. The person was not authorized to disclose the plans and spoke on the condition of anonymity.

Spokespeople for the District of Columbia National Guard and a military task force overseeing all the guard troops in Washington did not immediately respond to messages seeking comment.

AP writer Anna Johnson contributed to this report.

The St. Thomas-St. John’s rivalry effectively ceased to exist when the Tommies made the jump to Division-I athletics after being dumped from the MIAC.

But some traditions die hard.

The rivalry will be renewed on the hardwood in December, with the men’s basketball teams squaring off Dec. 11 at the new Lee & Penny Anderson Arena in St. Paul.

Division-III games have no bearing on postseason metrics for Division-I schools, so they’re effectively exhibitions. Every Summit League School schedules three Division-III opponents each season as a way to get non-conference home games, which are a bear for smaller mid-major Division-I programs to schedule.

Tommies coach John Tauer said it is “a game that we felt would be attractive to both fan and alumni bases, as well as the entire basketball community in the state of Minnesota.”

Tauer also cited his respect for St. John’s coach Pat McKenzie and the Johnnies program. St. John’s won the MIAC title again last season.

“It is common for Division I men’s basketball programs to play select Division III programs,” St. Thomas athletic director Phil Esten said, “and the Johnnies are a fitting opponent, as we continue to honor our past while welcoming a new era of Tommie Athletics.”

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By ELAINE KURTENBACH, Associated Press Business Writer

BANGKOK (AP) — Nvidia CEO Jensen Huang said Friday that the company is discussing a potential new computer chip designed for China with the Trump administration.

Huang was asked about a possible “B30A” semiconductor for artificial intelligence data centers for China while on a visit to Taiwan, where he was meeting Nvidia’s key manufacturing partner, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corp., the world’s largest chip maker.

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“I’m offering a new product to China for … AI data centers, the follow-on to H20,” Huang said. But he added that “That’s not our decision to make. It’s up to, of course, the United States government. And we’re in dialogue with them, but it’s too soon to know.”

Such chips are graphics processing units, or GPUs, a type of device used to build and update a range of AI systems. But they are less powerful than Nvidia’s top semiconductors today, which cannot be sold to China due to U.S. national security restrictions.

The B30A, based on California-based Nvidia’s specialized Blackwell technology, is reported to operate at about half the speed of Nvidia’s main B300 chips.

Huang praised the the Trump administration for recently approving sales of Nvidia’s H20 chips to China after such business was suspended in April, with the proviso that the company must pay a 15% tax to the U.S. government on those sales. Chip maker Advanced Micro Devices, or AMD, was told to pay the same tax on its sales of its MI380 chips to China.

As part of broader trade talks, Beijing and Washington recently agreed to pull back some non-tariff restrictions. China approved more permits for rare earth magnets to be exported to the U.S., while Washington lifted curbs on chip design software and jet engines. After lobbying by Huang, it also allowed sales of the H20 chips to go through.

Huang did not comment directly on the tax when asked but said Nvidia appreciated being able to sell H20s to China.

He said such sales pose no security risk for the United States. Nvidia is also speaking with Beijing to reassure Chinese authorities that those chips do not pose a “backdoor” security risk, Huang said.

“We have made very clear and put to rest that H20 has no security backdoors. There are no such things. There never has. And so hopefully the response that we’ve given to the Chinese government will be sufficient,” he said.

The Cyberspace Administration of China, the country’s internet watchdog, recently posted a notice on its website referring to alleged “serious security issues” with Nvidia’s computer chips.

It said U.S. experts on AI had said such chips have “mature tracking and location and remote shutdown technologies” and Nvidia had been asked to explain any such risks and provide documentation about the issue.

Huang said Nvidia was surprised by the accusation and was discussing the issue with Beijing.

“As you know, they requested and urged us to secure licenses for the H20s for some time. And I’ve worked quite hard to help them secure the licenses. And so hopefully this will be resolved,” Huang said.

Unconfirmed reports said Chinese authorities were also unhappy over comments by U.S. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick suggesting the U.S. was only selling outdated chips to China.

Speaking on CNBC, Lutnick said the U.S. strategy was to keep China reliant on American chip technology.

“We don’t sell them our best stuff,” he said. “Not our second best stuff. Not even our third best, but I think fourth best is where we’ve come out that we’re cool,” he said.

China’s ruling Communist Party has made self-reliance in advanced technology a strategic priority, though it still relies on foreign semiconductor knowhow for much of what it produces.

AP Videojournalist Taijing Wu in Taipei contributed to this report.