Teller County Coroner details multi-step legal process to cremate or bury a body
TELLER COUNTY, Colo. (KRDO) - The process to bury or cremate a body is a complicated one that involves multiple steps and coordination from different entities.
Stephen Tomsky, the Teller County Coroner and the funeral director at Mountain Memorial Funeral Home said the process of burying or cremating a body is extensively logged.
“It is a very tight process,” he said. “You can't just show up and get someone cremated. You have to have that permit and then they have to have it all logged.”
He said when a funeral home picks up or receives a body it must get a disposition permit from the county or state health department. This disposition permit essentially gives the funeral home permission to take a body to a cemetery or crematory to have it buried or cremated.
“It just gives us the authority to say that the state knows what happened to this person, so it's just so that you didn't take them from the hospital, from the house, and then no one knows where they went,” Tomsky said. “The state knows that they came to X, Y, Z funeral home, and then from X, Y, or Z funeral home, they went to the crematory or the cemetery.”
The cemetery or crematory then takes the disposition permit from the funeral home, performs the requested burial or cremation, and keeps the disposition permit for their files. Not following this process violates state law.
Colorado law states, “A crematory shall not cremate human remains unless the crematory has obtained a statement containing authorization to cremate the human remains.”
“You can't just take mom from the house and bring her out back and bury her,” Tomsky explained.
A disposition permit is also required for the finalization of a death certificate because the permit says what funeral home the body came from and where the body was buried or cremated. Tomsky said that information is included on a death certificate, which many families need to change insurance policies or bank accounts.
It is unclear to what extent the Return to Nature Funeral Home followed the disposition permit process.
Tomsky said it is possible to falsify disposition permits but questions why someone would do that because then there is a record that the deceased was buried or cremated at a particular place when they likely weren’t.
“If I put in, Mrs. Jones is going to be cremated at Great Divide Crematory — yes, I could falsify it — why would you do that? I don't know. Because then there's a record that person was supposed to go there.”
Tomsky said the state could add another step to the process that would help prevent situations like the one at the Penrose funeral home from happening again. He suggests cemeteries and crematories return the disposition permit to the health department after they complete the burial or cremation.
“In six weeks, if you don't get the permit back,” Tomsky said, “they could say, ‘Well, wait a second, what's going on here? Where's the permit?”
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