Former Lake County coroner sentenced to jail in child cremation case

Shannon Kent, the former coroner for Lake County, was sentenced to six months in jail in the last of a series of criminal cases that began when authorities conducted an unannounced search of his home's basement in 2020. 

The 47-year-old Kent was the owner of a private funeral home and mortuary franchise at the time, in addition to his role as Lake County Coroner, an elected position he'd held since 2014. 

According to a press release from the 5th Judicial District Attorney's Office, Judge Catherine Cheroutes said during Kent's sentencing that he'd become "entitled and arrogant" due to his positions, and that probation was not an appropriate punishment. She then ordered Kent to serve six months in the Lake County Jail.

Kent started to run into trouble in 2019. He was indicted in March 2019 for using his wife as a deputy coroner despite a her lack of certification. 

In October of 2020, a woman whose infant died in December of 2019 and was allegedly cremated by the Kent-Bailey Funeral Home told Lake County Sheriff's Office investigators she suspected something was amiss with the child's cremated remains, according to an incident report obtained by CBS4. They weighed much more than expected. 

The ashes were tested by experts in Denver and found to contain abnormalities. Bits of metal, possibly from jewelry, were found. The results also suggested the ashes she received were a mix of an infant, another adult and perhaps an animal. 

Lake County authorities removed the Kent family from its home on Oct. 20 and searched the home-based business in the basement. 

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Lake County Sheriff Amy Reyes was among those entered the building. In her incident report, she described the scene in detail, often using hand-scribbled notes next to photos. 

Investigators struggled to keep their footing in the office section of the basement, Sheriff Reyes wrote. They maneuvered past stacks of paperwork that littered desks, poured from tilting cabinets, and overflowed from cardboard boxes on the floor. 

Elsewhere, in between piles of used body bags and gloves, around the examination table with open bottles of chemicals, through the shelves of medications and cremation containers, they stepped through pools of body fluids.  

"I was beginning to feel sick, weak, light-headed," Sheriff Reyes wrote in the report. "I ended the search."

A search was ultimately completed, but investigators never found records from 2019 with the name of the woman or her child, according to the report.

Three days after the search, the state suspended Kent's license to operate two of his five mortuaries. He surrendered his licenses to all the businesses - the Bailey-Kent Funeral Home in Leadville, the Everett Family Funeral Home and Crematory (dba Kent Funeral Home) in Gypsum, the Runyan Mortuary, Inc., in Buena Vista, the Hegmann Funeral Service, Inc. (dba Hegmann-Kent) in Idaho Springs, and the Runyan-Kent Mortuary in Silverthorne, weeks later.

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Kent and his wife, Staci, were then arrested by Summit County authorities and charged with abuse of a corpse and misconduct related to their handling of the body of a truck driver who died in a crash. 

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Two mistrials were declared, but both Kent and his wife were eventually found not guilty of those charges by a jury last summer.  

The truck driver's body was left at the Silverthorne funeral home for months on end, but the defense in the case effectively argued the Kents made steps to prepare the body the best they could while trying to transport him back to his family in Africa. They were unable to ship the body because of COVID-19 restrictions put in place.  

"We have maintained our honestly throughout all of this process and will continue to do so," Shannon Kent told CBS4 Mountain Newsroom Reporter Spencer Wilson after the verdict came down. "Additionally, I would want people to understand that the family that was caught in the middle of this case is suffering and we feel for them."  

Thursday's sentencing in Lake County ended the Kent's criminal prosecutions. 

"While today brought about the close of Shannon Kent's criminal cases,"stated 5th Judicial District Attorney Heidi McCollum in a press release, "we recognize that the parents of this tragedy are still living with this open wound. There are no words sufficient to capture the grief and anguish they have been put through from the loss of their son, and the complete lack of both respect and dignity they were shown by Shannon Kent." 

There are three levels to the coroner profession - coroner, medical examiner and forensic pathologist. Each requires increasingly higher levels of training to become certified. But the first level, that of coroner, is often manned by personnel in the smaller, more rural communities - where staffing is limited - who have the most basic qualifications. A coroner's position in those communities is often occupied by personnel already in the funeral business or others, such as firefighters and sheriff's deputies, who are among the first responders already present in the early stages of a death investigation.