The Cremation Association of North America is offering a course that would certify attendees in natural organic reduction operations.

For New Jersey funeral directors considering branching out into NOR, the Natural Organic Reduction Operations Certification would provide a “solid overview of best practices,” CANA said in a course description, and “in-depth comprehensive” of this form of body preparation.

The course could prove especially useful as New Jersey contemplates the rules it will promulgate to govern the practice of NOR in the state.

“Many states are instituting training requirements for NOR operators and CANA’s NOROC is designed to meet those requirements,” the association said.

The course, offered on demand, consists of four hours of online instruction and a final examine. Enrollees can take the course at their own pace. Each time a person logs off, their progress will be saved. Once an enrollee begins the course, they have 90 days to complete it.

To receive the NOR certificate, participants will need to complete all modules of the course and score 80 percent or better on the final exam. Participants can take the final exam up to three times.

More information on the course can be found here.

There are computer requirements to take the online course. A participant’s equipment must have sound capabilities to listen to videos and narration. Their desktop or laptop browser must be the latest version of Microsoft Edge, Google Chrome, Firefox or Safari. If using a mobile device, the browser must be the latest version of Safari for Apple iOS/iPadOS, Google Chrome for Apple iOS/iPadOS or Google Chrome for Android OS. JavaScript must be enabled. Any screen readers used must have the latest version of JAWS, NVDA, VoiceOver or TalkBack.

The cost of the course is $300. Those interested can register here.

New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association Executive Director and CEO George R. Kelder Jr., CFSP, was interviewed for a story on New Jersey’s shifting trends in disposition. A judge has halted the cremation of a Florida man based on concerns that the disposition would violate the man’s religious convictions. And the nation’s Tomb of the Unknown Soldier marks 100 years of honor guards. These stories and more are in the week in funeral news.

NEWS

The Way NJ Buries Its Dead Is Shifting. The Surprising Reasons Why
By Amira Sweilem (NJ.com)
The way New Jersey buries its dead is changing. Cremations first passed burials in total number in 2020 during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It seemed an aberration to some as the crisis flooded funeral homes and unleashed strict gathering restrictions. Read more here.

Judge Agrees Cremation Is Permanent, Orders Burn Ban
By Boca News Now
A Palm Beach County, FL, judge has temporarily halted the scheduled cremation of a recently deceased man after a local cemetery director intervened to protect the man’s religious wishes. The emergency order officially stops All County Funeral Home & Crematory from proceeding with the cremation of Kenneth Schaller, which was slated to happen early this week The court determined that allowing the cremation to move forward would cause irreversible harm before the dispute could be properly heard. Read more here.

Faith Leaders Condemn Deadly Shooting Before Funeral at Indiana Church
By Jesse Wells (Fox 59 News)
Police are still looking for the person responsible for a deadly shooting outside a church on the near north side of Indianapolis, IN. At the same time, more information has been released about the man killed in that shooting, which is being condemned by faith leaders across the city. Read more here.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier Marks 100 Years Since First Guard Posting
By Staff Sergeant Oscar Toscano (U.S. Army)
"We do not know from whence he came, but only that his death marks him with everlasting glory of an American dying for his country," said President Warren G. Harding, November 11, 1921. Harding delivered the remarks during the burial ceremony for the Unknown Soldier of World War I, whom he symbolically "fathered" as next of kin. Read more here.

Former Coroner in Wisconsin Charged with Criminal Misconduct
By Nick Bohr (WISN)
Timothy Deppisch, the last elected coroner of Ozaukee County, WI, is facing charges of misconduct in office after the county transitioned to a Medical Examiner's office in 2023. The 73-year-old is accused of falsifying mileage expenses for travel to funeral homes outside the county to view bodies, a requirement for issuing cremation permits. Read more here.

Decomposition and Yucca for a Headstone: New Mexico Cemetery Stresses Natural Burial
By Cormac Dodd (Santa Fe New Mexican)
Bryan Beard and Claire McFadyen strolled alongside the native willows and yucca plants demarcating rustic, natural gravesites that amount to little more than tidy mounds of earth out in this sweeping high desert prairie in New Mexico. Headstones were laid flat bearing names, birth and death dates, and epitaphs. However, this is no conventional modern cemetery but a natural burial site known as La Puerta Burial Ground, complete with a rock labyrinth, two miles down a dirt road in a remote region of Valencia County near western slopes of the Manzano Mountains. Read more here.

New Jersey ranks sixth in the nation for losses resulting from online scams and crimes with an estimated $3.1 billion in assets lost to various schemes and illegal activity in 2024, according to a new report.

The report, The Scam Economy: The True Cost of Online Scams and Crimes in America by the Consumer Federation of America, points to the vast undercounting of cybercrimes in extrapolating the true cost of the scams on Americans. The reported losses in New Jersey are nearly $435 million, but because reported crimes only account for approximately 14 percent of the total amount stolen, the actual cost is more than seven times higher.

“It’s the old iceberg metaphor,” the report quotes former Philadelphia, PA, police deputy commissioner Nola Joyce as saying. “What we know about is above the surface. But in terms of value, and in terms of harm, a lot of that crime is below the surface.”

New Jersey’s losses account for 2.62 percent of the nationwide total, well above what should be the state’s share of the costs of the crime. The state’s outsized presence in cybercrime victimhood is in part related to its relative wealth. With part of the state in the New York metropolitan area and its vast financial sector, New Jersey is part of “rich hunting grounds for online fraud and crime operations,” the report said.

It isn’t just wealthy brokers who can be victimized, though. Funeral service has proved to be a target of everything from telephone and ransomware scams to business email compromise crimes. Consumers can also become victims of crimes in which a funeral home’s phone number is spoofed by scammers and additional money is demanded for services.

The cybercrime problem has become so severe that it has drawn what might seem an unlikely parallel to a scourge that gets much more attention.

Scamming is now “on a par with the illegal drugs trade as one of the world’s biggest illicit industries,” according to an article in The Economist. “And unlike illegal drugs, scams cannot be seized by police or customs. With nothing more than a phone line and internet connection, scammers can turn anyone into a potential victim.”

The report called cybercrime a “hidden economic crisis.” In New Jersey alone, the per capita cost of cybercrime is $327. The crimes proliferate in part because the scammers “count on our collective silence.”

The report said there are “significant unrealized opportunities” to combat the rise in cybercrime, which experts expect to continue to grow. Among its recommendations are quarterly reporting from social media, messaging and texting apps and online marketplaces detailing scam incidents. The report also calls for centralized reporting to regulators and ad verification.

Also helpful would be a standardized definition of cyberfraud across various enforcement agencies in the United States and a methodology for gathering the true costs of these scams. The report states that the underreporting results from embarrassment in some cases to a lack of awareness that a scam even occurred.

Take heart, funeral directors. Artificial intelligence will not be replacing you anytime soon.

A recent report compiled by Microsoft found funeral service to be low in the ranks of jobs most threatened by AI, largely because it is a hands-on profession that cannot be easily replaced by artificial intelligence. Body preparation, for example, can’t be accomplished via cyber work.

That came as good news to the leader of one of the East Coast’s leading schools for mortuary science.

“While AI is transforming many industries, funeral service remains fundamentally human,” said American Academy McAllister Institute President Donald S. Cymbor Jr., who is a member of the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association. “Our graduates enter a stable, meaningful career that cannot be automated.”

The Microsoft study found that embalmers, for example ranked the fifth lowest among the 40 professions least likely to feel a measurable impact from AI. The only jobs that ranked lower were extraction workers; painters, masons and plasterers; plant and systems operators; and oral and maxillofacial surgeons.

While the physical aspects of funeral directing may make it immune from takeover by AI, some of the informational tasks involved in the profession could be enhanced by use of machine learning. For example, AI has already made inroads in obituary writing, with some companies offering packages that include AI obituary-writing tools.

“Most occupations have at least some information work component, reflected in our finding that AI is somewhat relevant to most occupations,” the study stated.

AI making inroads into tasks such as obituary writing makes sense, according to the Microsoft report. Media and communications workers rank the highest in what the report calls an “applicability score,” which measures how much the creation, gathering and dissemination of information is part of their jobs.

The information end of the any profession, however, is not the only area where AI may prove beneficial, according to the report. Record keeping and some financial work also rank high in applicability.

The result could be an office where certain tasks become automated with machine learning, including electronic filing, some bookkeeping and report generation. That may be good news for the funeral profession, where some daily tasks have little to do with working with families, body preparation and attendance at dispositions. AI may be able to handle much of that work, freeing up staff for more meaningful interactions with consumers and freeing up resources to increase the hiring of trained and qualified funeral professionals.

“Understanding which occupations have tasks within the current frontier of AI capability is important because these jobs are most likely to see productivity boosts or a shift in their core tasks,” the study stated.

That boost could be a boon for businesses such as funeral service, which can preserve its core function while still benefiting from the use of machine learning. And that may be just fine with families who still need an empathetic voice while they deal with loss.

“What the demand for human touch does tell us is that there will always be jobs that consumers do not want AI to do,” wrote Adam Ozimek in The Atlantic. “The existence of some demand for human labor is consequential. When there is some demand for a good or a service, we can spur more.”

In observance of Good Friday, the office of the New Jersey State Funeral Directors Association will be closed on Friday, April 3, 2026.

The office will reopen at 9:00 a.m. on Monday, April 6, 2026.

The NJSFDA leadership and staff wish a joyful Easter to all who celebrate.

A Colorado funeral home operator has been sentenced to 18 years in federal prison for conspiracy to commit wire fraud after pleading guilty in a case involving the mishandling of nearly 200 bodies, many of which were left stacked and decaying in the facility.

Carrie Hallford, who owned and operated Return to Nature Funeral Home along with her husband Jon Hallford, was also ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution. Her husband had been sentenced in 2025 to 20 years in prison on similar charges and ordered to pay more than $1 million in restitution.

In addition to the horrific discovery of the decaying bodies in 2023, the Hallfords had fraudulently obtained $882,300 in COVID-19 relief funds from the federal Small Business Administration, according to prosecutors. Those funds were made available from the Economic Injury Disaster Loan program which provided emergency funds to businesses crippled by the pandemic.

Rather than using the funds for approved business-related purposes, the Hallfords were accused of spending the money on a vehicle, vacations, cosmetic medical procedures, dinners and jewelry. More than $19,000 was spent on items from Amazon, according to a story in The New York Times.

Both Hallfords also pleaded guilty to abuse of corpse charges in Colorado state court. Jon Hallford was sentenced to 40 years in prison on those charges, and Carrie Hallford is facing between 25 and 35 years in prison on the state charges. Carrie Hallford is scheduled to be sentenced in April 2026.

Prosecutors argued that Carrie Hallford dealt with much of the business end of Return to Nature, handling the banking, invoicing, contracting and paperwork. The federal government alleged that more than $130,000 was collected from consumers for cremations and burials that were never conducted.

“It takes an exceptionally sick person to even think of a fraud scheme like Jon and Carie Hallford’s, let alone carry it out. Their disregard for fundamental human dignity is almost beyond belief,” U.S. Attorney for the District of Colorado Peter McNeilly said in a press release. “I hope the victims take some solace in the serious sentences handed down to both Hallfords. This case doesn’t right the wrongs the victims have suffered, but it does stand as an unequivocal condemnation of the Hallfords’ horrific criminal conduct.”

The sentencing of Carrie Hallford brings to a conclusion the federal portion of one of several sensational crimes that rocked the funeral industry in Colorado, which had the most lax regulations governing funeral service in the country. Colorado was the only state in the U.S. where funeral directors were not licensed. Until recently, the state also required prior approval from funeral home owners before inspectors could enter the facilities.

The state in 2024 adopted a sweeping reform of funeral industry regulations, which called for the licensing of funeral directors, along with basic education and continuing education requirements. Those reforms, however, will not take effect until 2027.

The Hallfords’ case received national attention, in part because of the impassioned pleas for maximum punishment from families deceived by the funeral home owners.

“I’m a daughter whose mother was treated like yesterday’s trash and dumped in a site left to rot with hundreds of others,” the Associated Press reported Kelly Mackeen, whose mother’s remains were at Return to Nature, as saying during Jon Hallford’s sentencing. “I’m heartbroken, and I ask God every day for grace.”

The mixture of the neglect of nearly 200 bodies and the wire fraud charges showed a callous disregard for both the families of the decedents and the rule of law.

"The defendant defrauded grieving families she agreed to serve while deceiving the federal government in order to obtain benefits meant to assist businesses during the pandemic,” FBI Denver Special Agent in Charge Amanda Koldjeski said in the press release. “She denied families well deserved dignity and showed blatant disregard for government rules. She lied and exploited families and systems to enrich her lifestyle with absolutely zero regard for the great harm she caused to so many."