More than a decade ago, John Cordova listened to his granddaughter’s first cry.
Soledad Cordova was born two months premature at a hospital in Pueblo in 2012. She lost consciousness after she was born and died on the day of her birth, despite the medical staff’s best efforts to revive the infant.
Cordova entrusted Soledad’s body to his longtime friends, brothers Brian and Chris Cotter, owners of Davis Mortuary in Pueblo. They agreed to cremate her remains, and gave the family an urn with what they believed to be Soledad’s ashes. The family buried the urn alongside Cordova’s late wife.
But in August, Soledad’s body was discovered among 24 bodies inside a hidden room at the Pueblo funeral home. The infant’s body was never cremated. Investigators found her body in a small white box, wrapped with green ribbon, inscribed with her name.
John Cordova on Thursday sued the Cotter brothers, Davis Mortuary and the Pueblo Masonic Temple Annex Association, which owns the building at 128 Broadway Ave., where the brothers have long leased space for the mortuary.
Cordova was joined in the lawsuit by family members of two other people — Melvin Emerson and Carl Walker — whose bodies were discovered in the hidden room earlier this year.
The complaint for the first time publicly identifies some of the 24 bodies that state regulators discovered Aug. 20. The regulators found the bodies during the state’s first inspection of the funeral home under a new law passed in 2024 aimed at bringing more oversight to the industry after a string of recent scandals.
Authorities found the two dozen bodies as well as containers filled with bones and tissue behind a hidden door in the mortuary. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation has identified just six bodies so far, and has not publicly named the victims.
The complaint details Brian Cotter’s standing in the Pueblo community — he served as the county’s elected coroner from 2014 until his resignation in August, shortly after the bodies were discovered. He also was a leader within the Pueblo Masonic Temple Lodge 17, which operated in the same building as the mortuary, the lawsuit alleges.
Brian Cotter served as the Colorado State Grandmaster of Masons between at least 2009 and 2010, a position also known as the Worshipful Master, the lawsuit claims. The complaint also notes that green — the color of the ribbon on the box holding Soledad Cordova’s remains — symbolizes the “immortality of the soul” within Freemason teachings.
A message left with the Pueblo Masonic Temple Annex Association for comment was not returned. Richard Orona, an attorney for the families, said he included the Masonic association in the lawsuit because they regularly met in the second and third floors of the building above the mortuary, and as landlords for the mortuary had a responsibility to keep tabs on the space below.
“You have 24 decomposing bodies at the same time in the same room — that smell has got to be overwhelming when you walk into that building,” he said. “…The defendants were in and out of that building every day. …And the fact that nothing was done is very troublesome to the families.”
Brian Cotter’s good reputation in the community was part of the reason Patricia Emerson chose Davis Mortuary for her husband Melvin’s funeral arrangements. She was familiar with the funeral home through her work at a Pueblo hospital.
She paid the mortuary $3,000 on top of the bills paid by Medicaid for her husband’s arrangements, the lawsuit claims. She asked to see his body after it was transported to the funeral home, but Brian Cotter refused to allow her to do so, the lawsuit states.
“Through his words and tears, Defendant Brian Cotter made personal guarantees to the Emerson family that Mr. Melvin Emerson’s remains would be handled with the utmost care,” the lawsuit reads.
The family believed the urn they received from the facility contained Melvin Emerson’s remains until they were notified in September that his body had been found among the others in the hidden room.
Neither Brian nor Chris Cotter has been arrested or charged with any crimes, which Orona said is his clients’ number one frustration.
“That is what is pressing on their emotions: the fact they have not been arrested, no one has been held accountable,” Orona said. “Every day that goes by is lost justice for them. They’re anxious to get the lawsuit going, and to start holding these people accountable.”
Authorities have said the investigation remains underway and the effort to identify the remains through DNA analysis is likely to take months.
The discovery of the bodies at Davis Mortuary is one of several scandals of late in Colorado’s funeral industry.
A Jefferson County funeral home director was sentenced to 18 months in prison this year after he was accused of leaving a woman’s corpse in the back of a hearse in Denver for more than a year and improperly storing the cremated remains of at least 30 people at his home.
Investigators also found nearly 200 decomposing bodies piled inside the Return to Nature Funeral Home in the southern Colorado town of Penrose in 2023. That same year, a mother-daughter duo who operated the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose were sentenced to 15 and 20 years in federal prison for selling the body parts of more than 500 deceased clients.
Those scandals prompted lawmakers to require regular state inspections of funeral homes beginning in 2024.
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