By JESSE BEDAYN

COLORADO SPRINGS, Colo. (AP) — Derrick Johnson buried his mother’s ashes beneath a golden dewdrop tree with purple blossoms at his home on Maui’s Haleakalā Volcano, fulfilling her wish of a final resting place looking over her grandchildren.

Then the FBI called.

It was Feb. 4, 2024, and Johnson was teaching an eighth-grade gym class.

“’Are you the son of Ellen Lopes?’” a woman asked, Johnson recalled in an interview with The Associated Press.

There had been an incident, and an FBI agent would fly out to explain, the caller said. Then she asked: “’Did you use Return to Nature for a funeral home?’”

“’You should probably google them,’” she added.

In the clatter of the weight room, Johnson typed “Return to Nature” into his cellphone. Dozens of news reports appeared, details popping out in a blur.

Hundreds of bodies stacked on top of each other. Inches of body decomposition fluid. Swarms of bugs. Investigators traumatized. Governor declares state of emergency.

Derrick Johnson, whose mother’s body was one of 189 left to decay in the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo., poses for a portrait in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)

Johnson felt nauseated and his chest constricted, forcing the breath from his lungs. He pushed himself out of the building as another teacher heard his cries and came running.

Two FBI agents visited Johnson the following week, confirming his mother’s body was among 189 that Return to Nature’s owners, Jon and Carie Hallford, had stashed in a Colorado building between 2019 and Oct. 4, 2023, when the bodies were found.

It was one of the largest discoveries of decaying bodies at a funeral home in the U.S. Lawmakers overhauled the state’s lax funeral home regulations. And besides handing over fake ashes to grieving families, the Hallfords also admitted to defrauding the federal government out of nearly $900,000 in pandemic-era aid for small businesses.

Even as the Hallfords’ bills went unpaid, authorities said they spent lavishly on Tiffany jewelry, luxury cars and laser-body sculpting, pocketing about $130,000 clients paid for cremations.

They were arrested in Oklahoma in November 2023 and charged with abusing nearly 200 corpses.

Hundreds of families learned from officials that the ashes they ceremonially spread or kept close weren’t actually their loved ones’ remains. The bodies of their mothers, fathers, grandparents, children and babies had moldered in a room-temperature building in Colorado.

Jon Hallford will be sentenced Friday, facing between 30 to 50 years in prison, and Carie Hallford in April after a judge accepted their plea agreements in December. Attorneys for Jon and Carie Hallford did not respond to an AP request for comment.

Johnson, 45, who’s suffered panic attacks since the FBI called, promised himself that he would speak at Hallford’s sentencing and ask for the maximum penalty.

“When the judge passes out how long you’re going to jail, and you walk away in cuffs,” he said, “you’re gonna hear me.”

“She lied”

Jon and Carie Hallford were a husband-and-wife team who advertised “green burials” without embalming as well as cremation at their Return to Nature funeral home in Colorado Springs.

She would greet grieving families, guiding them through their loved ones’ final journey. He was less seen.

Johnson called the funeral home in early February 2023, the week his mother died. Carie Hallford assured him she would take good care of his mother, Johnson said.

Days later, she handed Johnson a blue box containing a zip-tied plastic bag with gray powder, saying those were his mother’s ashes.

“She lied to me over the phone. She lied to me through email. She lied to me in person,” Johnson told the AP.

The following day, the box lay surrounded by flowers and photos of Ellen Marie Shriver-Lopes at a memorial service at a Holiday Inn in Colorado Springs.

Photographs of Ellen Marie Shriver-Lopes, whose body was one of 189 left to decay in the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose, Colo., are stacked in her sister’s home in Colorado Springs, Colo., on Thursday, Feb. 5, 2026. (AP Photo/Thomas Peipert)

Johnson sprinkled rose petals over it as a preacher said: “Ashes to ashes, dust to dust.”

Caught on video

On Sept. 9, 2023, surveillance footage showed a man appearing to be Jon Hallford walk inside a building owned by Return to Nature in the town of Penrose, outside Colorado Springs, according to an arrest affidavit.

Camera footage inside showed a body laying on a gurney wearing a diaper and hospital socks. The man flipped it onto the floor.

Then he “appeared to wipe the remaining decomposition from the gurney onto other bodies in the room,” before wheeling what appeared to be two more bodies into the building, the affidavit said.

In a text to his wife, Hallford said, “while I was making the transfer, I got people juice on me,” according to court testimony.

The neighborhood mom

Johnson grew up with his mother in an affordable-housing complex in Colorado Springs, where she knew everyone.

Johnson’s father wasn’t around much; at 5 years old, Johnson remembers seeing him punch his mom, sending her careening into a table, then onto a guitar, breaking it.

It was Lopes who taught Johnson to shave and hollered from the bleachers at his football games.

Neighborhood kids called her “mom,” some sleeping on the couch when they needed a place to stay and a warm meal. She would chat with Jehovah’s Witnesses because she didn’t want to be rude. With a life spent in social work, Lopes would say: “If you have the ability and you have the voice to help: Help.”

Johnson spoke with his mother nearly everyday. After diabetes left her blind and bedridden at age 65, she’d ask Johnson to describe what her grandchildren looked like over the phone.

It was Super Bowl Sunday in 2023 when her heart stopped.

Johnson, who had flown in from Hawaii to be at her bedside, clutched her warm hand and held it until it was cold.

A gruesome discovery

Detective Sgt. Michael Jolliffe and Laura Allen, the county’s deputy coroner, stood outside the Penrose building on Oct. 3, 2023, according to the 50-page arrest affidavit.

A sign on the door read “Return to Nature Funeral Home” and listed a phone number. When Jolliffe called it, it was disconnected. Cracked concrete and yellow stalks of grass encircled the building. At back was a shabby hearse with expired registration. A window air-conditioner hummed.

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

Someone had told Jolliffe of a rank smell coming from the building the day before, the affidavit said.

One neighbor told an AP reporter they thought it came from a septic tank; another said her daughter’s dog always headed to the building whenever it got off-leash.

It was reminiscent of rancid manure or rotting fish, and struck anyone downwind of the building.

Jolliffe and Allen spotted a dark stain under the door and on the building’s stucco exterior. They thought it looked like fluids they had seen during investigations with decaying bodies, the affidavit said.

But the building’s windows were covered and they couldn’t see inside.

Allen contacted the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agency, which oversees funeral homes, which got in touch with Jon Hallford. Hallford agreed to show an inspector inside the next afternoon.

Inspector Joseph Berry arrived, but Hallford didn’t show.

Berry found a small opening in one of the window coverings, the affidavit said. Peering through, he saw white plastic bags that looked like body bags on the floor.

A judge issued a search warrant that week.

FILE – This combination of booking photos provided by the Muskogee County, Okla., Sheriff’s Office shows Jon Hallford, left, and Carie Hallford, owners of Return to Nature Funeral Home. (Muskogee County Sheriff’s Office via AP, File)

Bodies stacked high

Donning protective suits, gloves, boots and respirators, investigators entered the 2,500-square-foot (232-square-meter) building on Oct. 5, 2023, according to the affidavit.

Inside, they found a large bone grinder and next to it a bag of Quikrete that investigators suspected was used to mimic ashes. Bodies were stacked in nearly a dozen rooms, including the bathroom, sometimes so high they blocked doorways, the affidavit said.

There were 189.

Some had decayed for years, others several months, according to the affidavit. Many were in body bags, some wrapped in sheets and duct tape. Others were half-exposed, on gurneys or in plastic totes, or lay with no covering, it said.

Investigators believed the Hallfords were experimenting with water cremation, which can dissolve a body in several hours, the document said. There were swarms of bugs and maggots.

Body bags were filled with fluid, according to the affidavit. Some had ripped. Five-gallon buckets had been placed to catch the leaks. Removal teams “trudged through layers of human decomposition on the floor,” it said.

Investigators identified bodies using fingerprints, hospital bracelets and medical implants, the affidavit said. It said one body was supposed to be buried in Pikes Peak National Cemetery.

Investigators exhumed the wooden casket at the burial site of the U.S. Army veteran, who served in Vietnam and the Persian Gulf. Inside was a woman’s deteriorated body, wrapped in duct tape and plastic sheets.

The veteran’s body was discovered in the Penrose building, covered in maggots.

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“Ashes to ashes”

Following the call from the FBI, Johnson promised himself he would speak at the Hallfords’ sentencing. But he struggled to talk about what had happened even with close friends, let alone in front of a judge and the Hallfords.

For months, Johnson obsessed over the case, reading dozens of news reports, often glued to his phone until one of his children would interrupt him to play.

When he shut his eyes, he said he imagined trudging through the building with “maggots, flies, centipedes. There’s rats, they’re feasting.” He asked a preacher if his mother’s soul had been trapped there. She reassured him it hadn’t. When an episode of the zombie show “The Walking Dead” came on, he broke down.

Johnson started seeing a therapist and was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder. He joined Zoom meetings with other victims’ relatives as the number grew from dozens to hundreds.

After Lopes’ body was identified, Johnson flew in March 2024 to Colorado, where his mother’s remains lay in a brown box in a crematorium.

“I don’t think you blame me, but I still want to tell you I’m sorry,” he recalled saying, placing his hand on the box.

Then Lopes’ body was loaded into the cremator and Johnson pushed the button.

Justice

Johnson has slowly improved with therapy, engaging more with his students and children. He practiced speaking at the Hallfords’ sentencings while in therapy. Closing his eyes, he envisioned standing in front of the judge — and the Hallfords.

“Justice is, it’s the part that is missing from this whole equation,” he said. “Maybe somehow this justice frees me.”

“And then there’s part of me that’s scared it won’t, because it probably won’t.”

The United States mixed doubles curling team of Duluthians Cory Theisse and Korey Dropkin couldn’t have asked for a better start to the 2026 Winter Olympics, knocking off Norway and Switzerland in their first two round-robin matches on Thursday.

After sitting out the first session on Wednesday night, Thiesse and Dropkin survived to defeat Norway’s Kristin Skaslien and Magnus Nedregotten 8-6 on Thursday morning.

Though mixed doubles games are often very open, with both sides being in a position to score, the team with the last shot, known as the “hammer,” was the team that scored in each of the first seven ends.

On the last rock of the seventh, Thiesse’s shot ejected one Norway stone and nudged another out of the way to give the United States two points, but being unable to get rid of the second Norway stone entirely meant that the game went to the eighth and final end tied, with Norway holding the hammer.

However, Norway made multiple errors in the final end. Thiesse’s last shot came up short, giving the Norwegians an opportunity to supplant two American stones at the center of the rings, but Skaslien’s shot did not curl enough. The Americans stole two points — and the win — from a duo that has medaled in both 2018 and 2022.

Thiesse and Dropkin were the better side against Switzerland’s Briar Schwaller-Hurlimann and Yannick Schwaller by a significant margin.

The Americans stole points without the hammer in the first and fourth ends for a 5-2 lead at the halfway point.

A missed takeout by Schwaller-Hurlimann allowed Thiesse to make an open draw to the button (the center of the rings) for two more points in the sixth end. The Swiss scored only one in the seventh and conceded the match early in the eighth when they ran out of possible stones.

The Americans still have seven more round-robin matches ahead of them, with two more on Friday. The U.S. was scheduled to play Canada (one of two other undefeated teams so far) at 3:05 a.m. CST, then Czechia at 7:35 a.m. CST.

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By MIKE SCHNEIDER

ORLANDO, Fla. (AP) — The U.S. Census Bureau plans to use a survey form with a citizenship question as part of its practice test of the 2030 census, raising questions about whether the Trump administration might try to make a significant change to the once-a-decade headcount that failed during the president’s first term.

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The field test being conducted in Huntsville, Alabama, and Spartanburg, South Carolina, is using questions from the American Community Survey, the comprehensive survey of American life, rather than questions from recent census forms.

Among the questions on the ACS is one that asks, “Is this person a citizen of the United States?” Questions for the census aren’t supposed to ask about citizenship, and they haven’t for 75 years.

Last August, Trump instructed the Commerce Department to have the Census Bureau start work on a new census that would exclude immigrants who are in the U.S. illegally from the head count.

The Constitution’s 14th Amendment says “the whole number of persons in each state” should be counted for the numbers used for apportionment, the process of divvying up congressional seats, and Electoral College votes among the states. The Census Bureau has interpreted that to mean anybody living in the U.S., regardless of legal status.

The bureau did not respond Thursday to inquiries seeking comment about why the ACS questions were being used for the 2026 test.

Terri Ann Lowenthal, a former congressional staffer who consults on census issues, said the ACS questions have never been used for a census field test before. She said the 2026 test — which was pared down from six locations to two — has become “a shell of what the Census Bureau proposed and should do to ensure an accurate 2030 Census.”

“This full pivot from a real field test is alarming and deserves immediate congressional attention, in my view,” Lowenthal said.

The field test gives the statistical agency the chance to learn how to better tally populations that were undercounted during the last census in 2020 and improve methods that will be used in 2030. Among the new methods being tested is the use of U.S. Postal Service workers to conduct tasks previously done by census workers.

The test originally was supposed to take place in six places, but the Trump administration earlier this week announced that it had eliminated four sites — Colorado Springs, Colorado, western North Carolina, western Texas and tribal lands in Arizona.

Mark Mather, an associate vice president at the Population Reference Bureau, a nonpartisan research group, said he couldn’t speculate on political motivations behind the decision to use the ACS questions, but said the more fundamental concern was methodological.

“The ACS form wouldn’t provide a valid test of 2030 census operations,” he said. “It’s a completely different animal.”

In his first term, President Donald Trump unsuccessfully tried to add a citizenship question to the 2020 census form. He also signed orders that would have excluded people who are in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment figures and mandated the collection of citizenship data.

The attempt to add the citizenship question was blocked by the U.S. Supreme Court, and both orders were rescinded when Democratic President Joe Biden arrived at the White House in January 2021, before the 2020 census figures were released.

Republican lawmakers in Congress recently have introduced legislation that would exclude some non-citizens from the apportionment figures. Several GOP state attorneys also have filed federal lawsuits in Louisiana and Missouri seeking to add a citizenship question to the next census and exclude people in the U.S. illegally from the apportionment count.

Follow Mike Schneider on the social platform Bluesky: @mikeysid.bsky.social.

Follow the AP’s coverage of the U.S. Census Bureau at https://apnews.com/hub/us-census-bureau.

There was no Giannis Antetokounmpo deal ahead of Thursday’s NBA trade deadline, to Minnesota or anywhere else. The Bucks elected to hold on to their superstar until this summer, at the very least.

The Timberwolves didn’t feel like they were close to pulling that one off this week, as Milwaukee never seriously engaged in discussions.

Yet Minnesota still managed to emerge from the trade deadline with an important piece in Chicago guard Ayo Dosunmu, a capable defender whose offensive game has blossomed to the point where he’s averaging 15 points a game on 45% shooting this season. He was exactly the type of player the Wolves needed to round their rotation into one that can legitimately compete through three rounds of the Western Conference playoffs.

That’s only one way in which the move served as a masterclass in roster construction from Timberwolves basketball boss Tim Connelly, who walked the line of roster improvement and financial obligation.

The trade Minnesota made Tuesday — a deal that sent Mike Conley and a pick swap in exchange for cash considerations — wasn’t made to clear the runway for a blockbuster. It was a salary dump to satisfy ownership’s wishes to lower a luxury tax bill. That’s been an overarching directive: cut down on expenses.

There’s nothing illegal about frugality in pro sports; numerous teams spent the past few days wiggling their way out of the luxury tax. But it’s not necessarily something that builds a fan base, especially when it undermines what new majority owners Marc Lore and Alex Rodriguez have preached since entering the fold in Minnesota, and was reiterated upon gaining official control of the organization last summer, when Lore and Rodriguez expressed no hesitation to pay the tax if it meant fielding a competitive roster.

“Because it’s creating enterprised value over the long term,” Lore said. “And I think that’s the way we think about it. Investing in the team, in winning, creates long-term franchise value. And it’s not over the next three to five years, but 10, 20, the next 50 years even. We’re prepared to invest, we’re prepared to lose money to create a … sustainable winning culture.”

Minnesota has been to consecutive Western Conference Finals, with former majority owner Glen Taylor paying the luxury tax as recently as last season. The Timberwolves are again firmly in the hunt in 2026.

As Anthony Edwards demonstrated again in the fourth quarter of Minnesota’s stirring comeback Wednesday in Toronto, if you have No. 5, you have a chance. There are no locks in this year’s NBA, especially with the injury-riddled rosters on many of the league’s top teams.

This is a championship window for many clubs, Minnesota included.

But it was clear the Wolves’ roster needed something. The bench that buoyed the team last season wasn’t nearly as productive this year with Donte DiVincenzo moving into the starting lineup and Nickeil Alexander-Walker moving to Atlanta.

The Timberwolves reportedly could have netted Coby White in the deal that sent Conley to Chicago and declined. Other moves were available to improve Minnesota’s rotation earlier in the week, but not approved.

In last June’s draft, the Wolves sat atop the second round on Day 2 but traded their way down the board in the name of cash considerations.

Headline-grabbing investments have been made in the forms of new arena lighting and paying Kevin Garnett to return to the fold. Those excited the fan base. They aren’t nothing.

But costs have been trimmed in other areas, varying from staffing to small details that impact player experience.

Those cuts coincide with a recent season ticket renewal request rollout that featured massive price hikes, with some fans reporting increases of nearly 40%. One of the talking points for that decision was the luxury tax bill for ownership that, as of this week, is now significantly smaller.

But it does still exist, as Connelly coaxed a late commitment to stay above the cap in the name of competitiveness, which opened the door for the Dosunmu acquisition. That, in the end, is a credit to ownership for its willingness to bend. It also was a brilliant stroke of front office maneuvering from Minnesota’s president of basketball operations, one that came at a critical time to keep the Timberwolves moving forward as their franchise superstar continues his evolution.

The current modus operandi probably isn’t sustainable. The draft asset cupboard is now effectively empty, with most of the few remaining scraps available at the week’s outset now sold off. Everyone has to get on the same page moving forward if the goal truly is high-level, year-over-year success. And it should be for a team with a young, winning nucleus that includes one of the game’s best players.

The Wolves need to develop their young players into contributors who earn and receive opportunities to help the team contend, or at the very least maintain enough value where they don’t require attached picks to be moved elsewhere.

Dosunmu is a short-term solution, but could be a long-term one — if he proves to be a fit — should Minnesota financially commit to the free agent-to-be this summer. That’s where ownership comes in.

Above all else, the new men in charge must prove themselves willing to fund a winning foundation, no matter the cost. Like they said they would.

But talk is cheap. Running a successful NBA team is not. Not if you’re in the business of contending for championships.

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