Pueblo County Coroner Brian Cotter submitted a letter of resignation through his attorney Thursday, a week after the Colorado Bureau of Investigation said it had discovered the remains of two dozen bodies in varying states of decomposition that were hidden away at Davis Mortuary, which Cotter and his brother Chris Cotter operated.
Inspectors with the Colorado Department of Regulatory Agencies shut the mortuary down after an annual inspection on Aug. 20 uncovered a hidden room containing multiple bodies, including one corpse reportedly stashed away for 15 years.
Gov. Jared Polis and more than a dozen local officials, including Pueblo County Sheriff David Lucero, called for Cotter’s immediate resignation.
Coroners in Colorado are elected officials, meaning they can’t be forced out of office except through a recall election or a voluntary resignation. That resignation came Thursday, after Cotter left the hospital where he was treated for a “cardiac event” following the Aug. 20 inspection, according to his attorney David Beller, with the Denver law firm Recht Kornfeld.
“Following his discharge, he’s acted swiftly to prioritize the concerns of the public as it relates to his position as Coroner. To that end, he hereby announces his retirement and submits his resignation for your acceptance,” Beller wrote in a letter to Pueblo County’s Board of County Commissioners.
The letter said Cotter’s effective resignation date would be Tuesday.
“Mr. Cotter has been a dedicated public servant to the people of Pueblo since 2014. He offers this resignation as a final act of public service, thus allowing the Coroner’s Office to continue its superb service to the people of this community — a public that Mr. Cotter holds dear,” Beller continued.
Beller didn’t respond to a request for additional comment on the resignation, and the Pueblo County Board of Commissioners issued a statement saying they would “be working diligently on the next steps in the process to fill the vacancy as outlined by law.”
A drive to hold a recall election was underway. Cotter’s resignation likely saved the county about $480,200 in costs based on prior recall elections, according to an .
Polis had declared a disaster emergency at the mortuary and directed state funds to assist in the investigation and hazardous cleanup at the facility, as well as efforts to stabilize the county’s coroner operations.
“I’m glad that Mr. Cotter has resigned. This is the first step in addressing the significant difficulties and pain he has caused the families impacted and the entire community. I’m grateful that he heeded the calls of the public to ensure that Pueblo County residents get the help needed in one of their darkest hours. I expect he will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law,” Polis said in a statement.
Beyond the 24 intact bodies removed from Davis Mortuary, investigators found multiple containers of bones and human tissue representing an unknown number of individuals, the CBI said Tuesday, adding that all the remains have been “respectfully” transferred to the El Paso County Coroner’s Office for attempted identification.
The CBI earlier this week said it had not questioned the Cotter brothers, who both have retained legal counsel, but it did obtain search warrants for their residences. It has yet to make any arrests in its ongoing investigation, which is complicated by the large number of potential victims.
The CBI had no additional updates to provide, a spokesman said Friday, and the Pueblo Police Department did not provide an update on its investigation.
The CBI has set up a victim assistance line at 719-257-3359 and is also accepting tips via email at CBITips@state.co.us for families who might have been customers of Davis Mortuary. Families are also encouraged to fill out a to assist with the investigative process, which could involve testing to see if cremains are genuine.
The Cotters purchased Davis Mortuary, which had served Pueblo for more than a century, in 1989, and were well-established in the community. Brian Cotter had served as the county’s coroner since 2014, and won reelection in 2018 and 2022.
Davis Mortuary is the latest in a string of funeral fraud cases to hit Colorado and make national headlines in recent years.
Investigators found 189 decomposing bodies stored at room temperature at the Return to Nature Funeral Home in Penrose in 2023 and charged owners Jon and Carie Hallford with abuse of a corpse, theft and forgery.
Last year, investigators found 30 sets of cremated remains in the rented Denver home of Miles Andrew Harford, the funeral director of Apollo Funeral & Cremation Services in Littleton.
In January 2023, Megan Hess and her mother, Shirley Koch, who operated the Sunset Mesa Funeral Home in Montrose, received 20-year and 15-year federal prison sentences after being convicted of selling the body parts of deceased clients without permission from 2009 to 2018.
Families paid Sunset Mesa for a cremation or burial, but the bodies of their loved ones were instead dismembered using power saws. The parts were stored in coolers and commercial refrigerators and then sold nationally and internationally through a side business the pair operated.
Families were provided with fake cremains to cover for the missing body parts. More than 500 victims were involved, according to the FBI.
