Crime Scene Cleanup: What It Involves

A crime scene cleanup service is not without its complications. Crime scene cleaning encompasses restoring the crime scene to its original state. When a crime is usually discovered, crime scene cleaners are not called until after officers of the law, like the crime scene investigators, have done their jobs first and have given the go ahead for the cleaners to come in. If you intend to hire a crime scene cleanup company, you must make sure that they are well equipped and fit right to get the job done. A crime scene presents challenging conditions.

The Use Of Protective Gears:
Crime scenes can very well involve the use of hazardous or deadly substances. For safety reasons then, it has become imperative that crime scene cleaners use protective clothing, in addition to protective tools and gadgets. You must see to it that they have all the necessary protective gears and gadgets. The protective clothing can consist of disposable gloves and suits. A disposable gear is preferred nowadays since it offers the best protection against contamination. You use it one time and get rid of it. That way, the dangers of contamination is virtually brought down to zero percent. Protective clothing extends to respirators and the use of heavy-duty industrial or chemical-spill protective boots.

Among the gadgets that a crime scene cleaning company must have are special brushes, special sprayers, and wet vacuum. These special tools ensure added protection against getting into contact with the hazard could very well be present in the crime scene. There is large, special equipment such as a mounted steam injection tool that is designed to sanitize dried up biohazard materials such as scattered flesh and brain. You would also need to check if they have the specialized tank for chemical treatments and industrial strength waste containers to collect biohazard waste.

Of course, any crime scene clean up must have the usual cleaning supplies common to all cleaning service companies. There are the buckets, mops, brushes and spray bottles. For cleaning products, you should check if they use industrial cleaning products. A crime scene cleaning company must have these on their lists:

1 - Disinfectants including hydrogen peroxide and bleaches - The kinds that the hospitals used are commonly acceptable.

2 - Enzyme solvers for cleaning blood stains. It also kills viruses and bacteria.

3 - Odor removers such as foggers, ozone machines, and deodorizers

4 - Handy tools for breaking and extending such as saws, sledgehammers, and ladders

Established crime scene operators also equip themselves with cameras and take pictures of the crime scene before commencing work which. The pictures taken may prove useful for legal matters and insurance purposes. You never know which.

Needless to say, a specially fitted form of transportation and proper waste disposal is also needed. These requirements are specific. As you can imagine, crime scene cleaning is in a different category on its own. A home cleaning or janitorial service company may not be able to cope up with the demands of a crime scene. A crime scene cleanup service requires many special gears and tools that a home cleaning or a janitorial service company does not usually have or does not require. Crime scene cleaning if not done correctly can expose the public to untold hazards.

What Else To Look For In A Crime Scene Cleanup Company
You may also want to hire a company that has established itself. An experienced company with a strong reputation is always a plus but it could be expensive too. You will do well to balance your needs with what is your budget. There are several companies that offer specific prices such as for death scene clean up categories and suicide clean up categories. Most companies own a website and have round the clock customer service as receptionists.

When looking for a suitable crime scene cleaning service, among the first things you need to do is to scout for price quotes. Crime scene cleanup services usually provide quote after they have examined the crime scene and then they give you a definite quote. Factors that are usually considered include the number of personnel that will be needed to get the job done. It also includes the amount of time that might be needed. The nature and amount of the waste materials that need to be disposed will also be factored in. You can be sure that the more sophisticated equipments needed the more expensive it will get.

Crime Scene Cleanup And Your Insurance
For homeowners, the best approach is always to make sure that crime scene cleanup services clauses and provisions are written down on the contracts or policies. The inclusion of crime cleanup services clauses is very common and has become standard clause in most homeowner’s policy. Make sure that you are covered for this unforeseen event. Make sure that your policy directs the crime scene cleaning company to transact directly with the homeowner insurance company. A crime scene cleaning service is usually a standard clause in many homeowners’ insurance clause. These companies often do the paperwork in behalf of clients.

If for some reason you do not have such coverage by any policies relating to crime scene cleanup on your home, there are ways to keep your expenses controlled.

Finding the right company can be very taxing, especially that you have to deal with the emotional stress stemming from the crime itself, especially with a crime scene involving death.

There are many crime scene cleanup companies in operation nowadays. There are reliable professionals that you can hire and prices are relatively competitive. As of recently, crime-scene cleanup services can cost up to $600 for an hour of their service. A homicide case alone involving a single room and a huge amount of blood can cost about $1,000 to $3,000.

In recent years, crime scene cleaning has come to be known as, "Crime and Trauma Scene Decontamination or CTS. Basically, CTS is a special form of crime scene cleaning focusing on decontamination of the crime scene from hazardous substances such as those resulting from violent crimes or those involving chemical contaminations such as methamphetamine labs or anthrax production. This type of service is particularly common when violent crimes are committed in a home. It is rare that the residents move out of the home after it has become a scene of a crime. Most often, the residents just opt to have it cleaned up. That is why, it is very important to hire the best crime scene cleaning company out there. The place needs to be totally free from contamination of any kind. You have to make sure that the company is able to remove all traces of the violent crime that took place. This includes cleaning biohazards that are sometimes invisible to the untrained eye.

Legally speaking, federal laws state that all bodily fluids are deemed biohazards and you should make sure that the cleanup service company you hire understands this and includes it in the cleanup. These things appear as blood or tissue splattered on a crime scene. You must be able to hire a company that is equipped with special knowledge to safely handle biohazard materials. The company must have the knowledge what to search for in any give biohazard crime scene. For instance, the company should be able to tell clues such that if there is a bloodstain the size of a thumbnail on a carpet, you can bet that there is about a huge bloodstain underneath. Federal and State laws have their own laws in terms of transport and disposal of biohazard waste. Make sure that the company you hire has all the permits necessary.

It will also be a huge plus if you could hire people who not only has the special trainings but also who have the nature to be sympathetic. If you are close to the victim and have the cleaning done at the behest of the victim’s relatives, it would matter that the cleaners tread the site with some level of respect. It is a common site that family members and loved ones are often there at scene. In general, when looking for a suitable crime scene cleaners, you would take into considerations the kind of situation that the crimes scene presents and the demands that it require. Crime scene cleaning companies handle a wide variety of crime scenes and prices may vary from one to the other crime scene and one to the other company.

Each type of scene requires its own particular demands not only to make the crime scene look clean and neat on the surface but to make it germ free, and clean inside and to make it free from all deadly and infectious substances. The cleanup cost for biohazards may vary depending on degree of the bio hazard(s) on the scene. There may even be a category that changes the cleanup pricing which usually involves decomposing bodies and carcasses. Likewise, a cleanup of chemical hazards vary, depending on the amount of chemical hazards as well as the grades i.e. how hazardous the substance is in terms of human contact. Prices are also determined by the number of hours and personnel that it would to get the crime scene cleaned. In addition, the "gross factor" from crime scene involving death and gore needs to be taken under consideration regarding the chemicals that will be used as opposed to those crimes' that do not have gore involved.

They're called when CSI done

By JODIE TILLMAN, Times Staff Writer

PORT RICHEY - Six liters of blood pump through the average human body. Rick Akin can't stop thinking about what happens when it gets out.

"Tile is great to look at, but grout is porous," he said over breakfast one morning, pointing at the floor of a Denny's restaurant. "Blood would soak through that."

He should know. He's seen blood soak through foam mattresses, seep under toilets and run nearly 9 feet down plumbing pipes. He's seen a stain "this big" underneath an orange shag carpet. He's seen blood stick to gorging flies that then alighted on walls and left little bloody dots.

Akin, 46, has seen all this as co-owner of D-N-A Extreme Clean, a Pasco company that he and pal Rob Debow started nearly two years ago to clean up suicide, homicide and belated discovery scenes. D-N-A is one of about 10 biohazard companies listed in a directory that Pasco Sheriff's Office can provide to victims' families upon request.

Hired by victims' family members or landlords, Akin and Debow don heavy Tyvek suits suits, three pairs of gloves and rubber boots and scrub blood and bodily fluids released as a body decomposes. They try to get rid of the unforgettable odor. They rip up stained carpets and dismantle bathrooms to track the flow of blood and fluids. They disinfect, and they triple bag before they haul the waste away.

Akin is matter-of-fact about the harsh details of this line of work, but he says he's motivated by a desire to help people through the hardest times of their lives.

"It gives me the warm fuzzies to help people," he said.

He has also found a business that suits his obsessive curiosity.

"I've been fascinated by blood spatters for years," he said.

He can't say exactly why, but he tells this story:

Years ago, when he was a teenager in Detroit looking to make some cash, he went to a blood bank to sell plasma. Fifty bucks a pint. He remembers sitting in a recliner and watching the workers hurry by. One of them, he says, dropped a bag of blood.

"Soon as it hit the floor, the blood shot across," he said.

Another worker dropped a bag of just plasma. "It just landed in a big gooey pool," recalled Akin.

He wondered why, so he got a high school science teacher to tell him about the properties of blood.

"When I'm interested in something I do everything I can to learn about it," said Akin. "Kind of like a shade tree mechanic? I'm a shade tree scientist."

Of course, there's another motivation for starting a business: Making money. Costs of D-N-A's services range from $500 to nearly $5,000 depending on the severity of the scene. Homeowners' insurance sometimes pays for the work, and families can also be reimbursed through a state fund for crime victims.

Akin thought the business would make good money, but so far that isn't happening. In two years, they've done about 24 jobs, some of which were just for cigarette smoke removal. Both he and Debow are keeping their day jobs, at least for now: Akin is an equipment technician for Pasco Fire and Rescue Department, and Debow runs a conventional cleaning company.

Akin started D-N-A with money - he won't say how much - borrowed from a friend and has yet to pay him back. None of this has helped out his personal financial situation, either: Akin lost his house to foreclosure earlier this year, and he, his wife and teenage son are now renting a home. Akin said his slow business is partly to blame.

Struggling for solvency is typical in this mostly unregulated industry. Dale Cillian, president of American Bio-Recovery Association and owner of a Phoenix company, said there's no one-stop source for how to operate one of these companies. And biohazard removal alone rarely pays the bills. Many of the roughly 400 biohazard companies, including his, make their money on remodeling the homes after they clean them.

"A lot of these companies go under," he said.

One reason is that marketing is tricky. Selling yourself at a time of suffering for someone else isn't easy.

D-N-A started out with marketing materials, for instance, that featured a hazard symbol. But Akin and Debow decided to go for a more sensitive touch: They changed their icon to a dove, with the tagline "No one should ever have to be a victim twice."

Akin, a friendly man prone to guileless self-promotion - "I'm a tough person to work for because I'm all about safety," he says - also blames law enforcement for not going far enough to make victims' families aware of the industry and managers of apartment complexes for trying to do the work themselves.

"Would they know to pull up the toilet?" he said one day when he and Debow were looking at photographs of an apartment bathroom they'd cleaned.

Few people think about blood as much as he does. But he says everyone should think about it a little more, and he has embarked on a publicity campaign.

He posted a message on a television news Web site - "Who is cleaning up the bloody messes?" - following a story about a homicide. He sent an angry e-mail to federal housing authorities after learning that the maintenance crew at a subsidized housing complex in Spring Hill had cleaned up an apartment where a person's body had been discovered rather than hire a company like his to do the work.

"Bad things happen to good people. And somebody has to be there to help pick up the pieces," Akin said. "Sooner or later, God forbid, you may need somebody like us."

THE CLEANER

By Liz Langley

When I saw the face in the blood, everything froze for a moment. The blood was everywhere – puddled and smeared, vivid and viscous, red and black on the floor and brown on the bathtub, where someone who couldn’t go on anymore had ended their anguish. One cannot help but imagine it: the despair, the decision, the penetration, the shock at the force with which one’s own blood can flow, the weakening, the collapse and finally the fall, the face coming to rest, hopefully with some gentleness, on the lip of the tub to die.

I didn’t see the face in the photo at first. It had to be pointed out to me, like Dalí’s “Slave Market With the Disappearing Bust of Voltaire,” the optical-illusion painting in which you see two women and then someone points out, “No, it’s a face, see it?” and then the face is all you can see. This ghostly imprint, left when the body was lifted away from the tub, is now all I can see in this photo. It’s disturbing on a primal level, evoking the quiet knowledge that anyone can succumb to hopelessness. Despair is so heartlessly democratic. I feel sure it’s the most haunting face I’ll ever see.

But this is just day one. And this is just a photo. Carmen Velazquez is the one who pointed that face out to me. She’s also the one who cleaned up the blood.

“This is the reality of what happens when somebody gets killed. This is what the family deals with,” she says, showing me photo after photo: murder-suicides, home invasions and natural deaths in which the body lay undiscovered for days. Carmen, 52, is the owner of Orlando-based Biohazard Response, an “accident, blood, crime, death and trauma scene cleanup” company that she started five years ago. Carmen’s husband, Michael Nestved, 48, is an 18-year veteran of the cleaning business. Along with nine employees (five contract workers; four employees on call), they remove the terrible debris of approximately three scenes of varying magnitude every week.

“You’re seeing these people at the worst time of their lives,” says Carmen, who was inspired to start Biohazard Response while doing community work for Harbor House, an organization that advocates for and works with victims of domestic violence. At the time she was dating Michael, who was working in a carpet-cleaning business. Feeling a calling to bring compassion to an aspect of victims’ lives that she felt was lacking, she put the two pursuits together and started her business, cleaning up the aftermath of violence and of nature. (Carmen still works full-time in the Orange County Clerk of Courts office as a customer-service administrator.)

“Nobody thinks anything is going to happen to them, that somebody in your family is going to commit suicide” or that some other calamity will strike, she says, and of course you can’t be prepared for every emergency. But what you should know is this: If a violent crime or a death occurs on your property and causes a mess, you’re responsible for the cleanup. An ambulance will remove the injured, the coroner will bear away the dead, but whatever is left behind is up to you. And honey, there are some things you just can’t Febreze.

. . .

“The most horrible thing in their life happens to them … they come across a dead body in their house,” says Jan C. Garavaglia, M.D., aka “Dr. G: Medical Examiner,” who lends her name and expertise to the forensics TV show on Discovery Health and is chief medical examiner for District Nine (Orange-Osceola). The ME’s office will provide a list of cleanup services to those in need, though being a government agency they cannot recommend any one in particular. (There are 19 on the list for the Central Florida area). You can also contact the American Bio-Recovery Association, an international network of companies, for information about what service a consumer might need for his or her situation and how to go about getting it. On the ABRA website (www.americanbiorecovery.com), for example, you’ll find that your homeowners insurance will probably cover the expense of biohazard cleaning. “Everybody will try to help them through it,” Dr. G. says. She would suggest employing a professional, “because it’s a tough, tough thing to do.”

“No matter how clean a scene gets,” Sheri Blanton, program manager at the District Nine ME’s office, says, “they are never going to be able to remove the situation … they will always know this is where it happened.” And realtors, by the way, don’t have to tell you anything horrendous happened in the house or apartment you’re looking at.

Orlando’s rising crime rate means more people will have to go through it, too. As of Dec. 5, according to the Orlando Homicide Report on orlandosentinel.com, the total number of murders in town this year was 118, almost beating the record of 121 set in 2006, with several weeks left to go.

“It’s gruesome,” Carmen says of her line of work. People intrigued by the profession tell her, “‘I’ve seen this CSI show, and that seems like a cool job.’ … The minute I hear ‘cool job,’” Carmen says, “I know that’s not the right person.” Carmen and Michael aren’t investigators; they don’t collect tiny hair follicles that will later condemn serial killers. They do things like go out to the airport in the middle of the night to remove a seat from an aircraft in which a patron had uncontrollable diarrhea.

Cool job.

It’s also an unbelievably hot job. “I’ve lost up to 10 pounds on a job. Carmen’s lost seven or eight,” just in water weight from dehydration, Michael says. The worst was the cleanup of a decomposed body in an un-air-conditioned trailer in August. Their ice-pack vests lasted only about an hour, and between the heat and the smell even the pros couldn’t bear the inside of the trailer for more than a few minutes at a time. There was another in which a woman and her dog had both died in the home (the dog, Michael says, died first), and the place was infested with fleas. In another photo, there is a swathe of blood on the floor where a drunk fell and hit his head outside of a holding cell.

These pictures are from Biohazard Response’s portfolios, before and after shots of all sorts of scenes, which I’m flipping through like family albums in Carmen and Michael’s spotless living room. The picture that’s most emblematic of this tricky and unglamorous business is not a job cleaned by the couple, but work someone else did – badly –and Biohazard Response was called in to clean up after the first cleaners. There was an “unattended death” in a kitchen, and the body was badly decomposed. The original cleaner failed to notice that fluid from the corpse had crept into the kitchen cabinets (wood being porous and liquid traveling up). This had attracted maggots, which were now cozily living inside the cabinet doors. It’s important to know about basic home maintenance and repair for this job; Carmen remodeled her own house by herself.

She says, “When you come into a scene, you have to know where was the body. Is there fluid coming from somewhere?” If the fluid seeps into the floor you probably won’t get rid of the smell; floors are often taken up and removed. Even sheet rock can absorb fluid. Also, human remains don’t smell like anything else, Michael says, not even like a dead animal. The smell is unimaginable. Alcoholics, he says, smell especially bad. Highly concentrated deodorizers are used to make scenes bearable. Carmen likes mint, but notes that “cherry works well with dead bodies.”

Some scenes are not just unpleasant. They’re dangerous.

“There are a lot of health issues for you and your employees,” Carmen says. Hepatitis is actually more dangerous than HIV because HIV dies quickly outside of the body and hepatitis does not (according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, hepatitis A can live outside the body for months). The couple has had to cut up mattresses soaked in decay – the cloth, the springs, the wood – in order to fit them into the legal containers. Biohazardous waste has to be put in regulation Occupational Safety and Health Administration red bags and then red boxes, after which you need a transporter’s permit to take it off site to an official disposal facility.

Couple biohazardous material with things like pointy mattress springs, broken glass and splintery wood and you need a fair amount of protective gear. Kimberly-Clark makes a hooded jumpsuit that goes over your clothes, followed by two layers of gloves – one latex, taped to the sleeve of the suit; the other either latex or a thicker material, like leather, depending on the job. Over your shoes you’ll wear paper booties and, if there’s broken glass or other potential dangers, thick, unforgiving rubber boots (imagine galoshes four sizes too small) that will go over your shoes with the paper booties over them. You might wear a splash shield or just a charcoal-filtered breathing mask, depending on how much odor or liquid you’re dealing with.

It looks like a lot of gear; I’ll find out how it feels when I’m allowed to shadow Michael on a job.

. . .

The neighborhood has a youthful energy and prosperity about it. Watching neighbors load coolers into their cars and go about their errands, the phrase “fatal stabbing” seems misplaced, like a curse word that slips out in polite company. This is not where you imagine such a thing happening.

The first thing Michael does is establish a “safety zone”; it’s a blue plastic tarp on the floor between the scene and the doorway so that nothing is tracked from the scene out of the house. In the bedroom there’s a large, dark stain on the carpet, a light blood spatter on the walls and smears of blood on the door frame. The walls are covered with notations the police have left, sticky-note style, noting every fleck and fluctuation in the pattern. Everything in the room that’s left (there’s not much) gets trashed, and Michael begins to take the police notes off the wall. Since there is no fingerprint dust, he says, they probably know who did it.

I ask if the stain on the carpet is blood.

“It could be blood,” Michael says. “Or it could be coffee or wine or chocolate milk. It could be a thousand things.” This is a you-never-know business, and a reason why it’s difficult to give sample prices. Some jobs are as low as $300 – the airplane incident, for instance. Others are as high as $5,600. Michael likens it to a car repair; you can’t call a mechanic and say you got in an accident and need an estimate – they have to see the car.

After removing the police tape, Michael washes the walls down with a strong disinfectant that also loosens up dried blood. The clean walls will be sprayed with a sealant. A restoration company will likely repaint. Then there’s that carpet. Michael has a liquid blood detector that will foam up – like hydrogen peroxide on a cut – if blood is present. He sprays the stain, and it fizzes and foams; it looks like the sound Pop Rocks make.

Now that we know it’s blood, Michael has to see how much of it has seeped in and where. He cuts out a square of the stained carpet; it’s a bit larger than an album cover. The blood has soaked through the padding beneath down to the cement under that. He goes through two sessions of scrubbing, using the blood detector as a guide, to make sure the area is clean. It remains for him to pack up all the equipment, including the stuff that’s going to the official disposal facility.

That the process of cleaning up after murder is accomplished in the time you’d pass at a long lunch is astonishing, and after this solemn and surreal experience, I’m proud of myself. I didn’t freak out or pass out. I was brave.

Then the phone rings. Would I like to go on another call?
. . .

The last one took two hours. This one will take three days. Day one will be the bug-bombing, which I won’t be there for. Day three is going to be taking up big chunks of the linoleum-tile floor. I won’t be there for that either.

I’ll be there for day two. And day two will be with me for awhile.

On a sunny weekday morning at 10 a.m., I arrive at an apartment where three people were killed. The crew – Carmen, Michael and a subcontractor from a debris removal company – has already started to haul the furniture out of the house. All of it. Couches, tables and mildewed air mattresses are taken out through the front door and pushed through windows and end up in the giant dumpster that Chris will haul away. I freak when red liquid starts pouring out of a couch; when a plastic bottle clatters onto the ground, I realize it was red Powerade. Before going in, I can see that there is blood – clumped, thick, smeared and tracked – inside the door, and that the apartment feels squalid; the air is so oppressive it has weight.

“Careful, there’s cucarachas over your head,” Michael says when I finally step inside, and sure enough, there’s a cadre of German roaches and other small bugs that survived the bombing. I pop outside. I’ll do this a dozen times before the day is over.

The power has been off for sometime and when Michael opens the refrigerator, the stench about knocks everyone over. I pop outside. The deodorizer that he usually dilutes in a gallon of water gets splashed around the room, not quite like champagne after a race, but you get the idea, and the clearing of the air makes everything feel less swimmy. What I thought was dirt all over the walls turns out to be fingerprint dust (it looks like black eye shadow). Another shooting apparently took place in the hallway where there’s more blood, and in another room, “R.I.P.” is spray-painted on the wall in huge red letters; Michael says it’s likely that someone broke in to do it.

Carmen knocks bloody baseboards away from the wall with a hammer and assesses the stains by the front door. Some of the floor will have to be taken out. With no electricity to power the tile remover and no generator available today, they will have to come back tomorrow. That’s OK; there’s plenty of cleaning to do right now.

The blood on the floor has been softened up with brushes, but it’s a machine that looks like an industrial buffer that will really take it up, pumping 200-degree water at a pressure of 99 pounds per square inch onto the floor. The fingerprint dust is washed off the walls wet, so we won’t breathe it in. Carmen and Michael talk to me while they work. “There was a person laying there,” Carmen says, pointing at the mess in the hallway, and in another room Michael jokes about how on TV they always have people doing jobs like this while they’re eating. They talk to me, but I notice, not to each other. They are so in synch in this process that they barely need to confer.

They also never need to use the bathroom; they’ve sweated so much it’s not necessary.

Throughout the day, curious passers-by have stopped to ask questions, so I’m not surprised when, on my millionth break outside, a woman stops to chat. She’s holding a toddler by the hand, the sweetest I’ve ever seen (and I’m not a kid person, not by miles). The woman and I talk and suddenly my legs buckle. In one second the impact of all this bloodshed comes down on me and I realize that I can’t even guess at the ripple effect of this, at how many people, to echo the words of Sheri Blanton of the ME’s office, will never be able to wash away the event. This is what Carmen has been trying to get through to me: Once I get it, it’s like being hit in the chest with a shovel.

I thought I had seen the most haunting face I ever would, but now there is another and it’s not just the face; it’s what goes on behind it, what the kids – and adults – who live around here will remember and how they’ll grow with it – that’s the haunting part. People must be at least as absorbent as kitchen cabinets.

I realize that while I could handle the mess, I don’t know if I can handle the unfairness of tragedy. The reason I have a hard time with it is the reason Carmen has taken it on.

“Before I do the cleaning, I talk to the family,” she says. “Sometimes you see the love in a house. Sometimes you see the loneliness.” Sometimes she sees where people have gone through things. “They take all the stuff and they leave all the pictures.” Because of her spiritual nature she prays for the victims.

There is a blend of warmth and coolness required to come and meet death on a regular basis. “You have to find that balance,” Carmen says, and “not just in this business.” It is, she says, about keeping in touch with reality.

The reality of death is not something most of us gravitate to. We may feast on it in fiction or live for what we believe happens after it, but most of us prefer to keep death a great mystery, while ignoring that, ironically, it’s also our greatest certainty. Thankfully not everyone feels that way. People like Carmen and Dr. G., who can handle the necessities of death, might not be there for us in the end, but they will be there for us after it, to take care of things after the accident or the illness, the gruesome find or the great disaster.

You know – the one that’s never going to happen to you.

Cleaning the scene

From wiping up bloody fingerprints to pulling hair from nasty drains, crime scene cleaners get the job done

By KATHLEEN CULLINAN

As Atlanta burned and her family starved and suffering closed in, Scarlett O’Hara, heroine of that epic tale, raised her fist to the sky and vowed to make things better. Whatever it took. After all, as she liked to say, tomorrow is another day.

But Scarlett never pulled clumps of hair enrobed in mucus out of her shower drain to make sure she could hack it on her own.

Tracy Gunn did.

She reached in one day and scooped up the slimiest, squishiest wads of who-knows-what in there. And she didn’t vomit. That’s how Gunn knew, in her despair over marital woes, desperate for a steady income in Golden Gate Estates, that she could be a crime scene cleaner.

"To this day," Gunn says, four years later, "I still think drains are one of the nastiest things."

Gunn and her best friend of 10 years, Alice Jackson, are the women whose business cards you hope never to need. From Orlando to Key West, and all around Southwest Florida, the 38-year-old mothers pull on biohazard suits and go where people have died violent or bloody or long-unnoticed deaths.

Into a Punta Gorda motel room, where a dead child’s bloody fingerprints are smeared across the walls.

Into a condo in Collier County, or the front seat of a car in Port St. Lucie, the tangy smell of body decay settling into their pores as they scrub out sinks and yank up carpet.

The body is removed, the crime scene tape comes down, the house is returned to the owner. Jackson and Gunn wipe away the remnants of death and make it a home again.

"It’s the women," Gunn said one morning recently, describing their customers over a plate of scrambled eggs and bacon at Bob Evans. "It’s the mothers, the daughters, the sisters, the wives; it’s those women who end up going into those scenes and doing what women do ... trying to clean it up."

"First they go, ‘Huh, you’re two ladies,’" Jackson said. "You’ll hear that in the background."

"And they think, like, we’re Merry Maids," Gunn added, with a laugh. "It’s like, we ain’t Merry Maids."

"Here we are ripping out floors, you know? We’re chicks with power tools," Jackson said. On the drive home, "We’re usually making fools of ourselves. But you need to let that out. You need that outlet."

It sinks in deep, seeing what people do to each other.

Ruth Ann Burns was schizophrenic. She believed her 7-year-old daughter Hannah was being abused. So in June 2004, she went to a motel room in Punta Gorda and stabbed the girl to death with a kitchen knife.

This was early in the history of Scene Clean. Gunn and Jackson wanted the work, and the bid they gave was rock-bottom.

But they weren’t hired. Maybe it’s just as well. In a draft of a memoir Gunn recently typed up, she described that blood-soaked room.

"As soon as you stepped in, you could smell death," Gunn wrote. "Once you absorbed that ... you saw the crime, I saw the horror. The little fingerprints on the wall."

"I heard her laughter, then her screams and cries."

Going back in time: Scene Clean was a nameless, formless dream when Jackson and Gunn, while their kids were asleep or at school, would sit on the phone watching "Forensic Files" and other autopsy shows on television.

Jackson had grown up in her family’s funeral home in New Jersey. Now she and Gunn were neighbors, each cleaning houses to fill time and pick up extra cash. The idea of parlaying that work into a business was tossed about but didn’t seem urgent until the winter of 2003.

Gunn’s marriage hit a sudden and deeply painful bump. Jackson’s father died after a long illness. One day in January of 2004, the pair met at Jackson’s front gate.

"We’ve been waiting, we’ve been talking about it, we’ve been hitting it around, but I’m tired of waiting," Gunn recalled saying. "Let’s do this. Let’s take our money and go down and let’s do this. And we did."

They launched the business within days. They found the training they needed for dealing with blood-borne pathogens and the handling and packaging of medical waste.

They got the supplies, the necessary shots. Looked for gross things and challenged each other to touch them.

Jackson once reached into a dead opossum to pull out the live babies inside.

Just to make sure she could.

Their first job came in the spring of 2004. It was an esophageal rupture, evidently a massively bloody way to die. They cut up the mattress and scrubbed the kitchen floors.

The man’s children lived out of town. Gunn and Jackson got $1,200 for four hours of cleaning.

But work was scarce in that first year. Months would go by between jobs.

Gradually, they got Scene Clean on the state and local lists that go out to families in this sort of need. They tacked a decal advertising the company in the back window of their sport utility vehicle and hooked up with insurance companies as preferred vendors.

Things started picking up.

These days, a call might be for a distressed house, where dozens of cats have lived in their own urine and feces for years. It might be a suicide or a gunshot wound to the head or slit wrists.

Or a woman stabbed to death by her husband as she raced through her house for the phone.

Or someone who died quietly. So quietly that no one noticed for weeks.

The families are in shock, traumatized, sometimes mortified to let Gunn and Jackson see what’s become of the home. Occasionally, there’s no real way to salvage it.

Gunn and Jackson love to point out the poetry. They built a company to sweep away pain — theirs, and their customers’.

Gunn is chattier, the one who answers the phone when customers call. Jackson’s more reserved. But they tumble over each other in conversation. One fills in the other’s pause, or pins on a quick word where her thought trailed off.

Sometimes they just have to bust out and sing. Beyonce, Gloria Gaynor. At Bob Evans, looking back on that day at Jackson’s front gate, they launched into the opening lines of "Lean On Me." Fingers snapping to the imaginary beat.

"We don’t look at the person who’s died as the victim," Gunn said, in a quieter moment. "We look at the family as the victim."

"Because they’re left," Jackson said.

"That’s the hardest thing for us, is knowing they’re meeting Scene Clean on one of the worst days of their lives, and we have to somehow make a business transaction," Gunn said.

"And they’re trusting us, and we can’t steer them the wrong way," Jackson said. "They cannot be victimized twice."

As for the future, maybe someday their kids will take over the company. But no outsiders.

"Everything that Scene Clean represents," Gunn said, sticking out a fist out for Jackson to top with hers, "it’s you and I, girl."

"That’s right, girl," Jackson said.

ABRA Florida Companies Donate Services to Assist Family Following Tragedy

Lakeland, FL Shooting
ABRA Donates Services
Gilbert, Arizona, May 6, 2009: Dale Cillian, President of the American Bio-Recovery Association (ABRA), a not-for-profit international association of crime and trauma scene cleanup professionals announced that on May 6, 2009 ABRA member companies Accident Cleaners of Williston, FL and Accident Scene Cleaners of Port St. Lucie, Fl provided no cost biohazard cleaning services to the Bellar Family located @ 2018 Creekbend Dr, Lakeland, FL on May 6, 2009. Mr. Bellar shot and killed his wife and two young sons before taking his own life on May 3, 2009.

On April 5, ABRA member companies, Disaster Clean Up of Endwell, NY, and Bio-Recovery Corporation of Queens, NY provided the crime/trauma scene cleaning for the American Civic Association located in Binghamton, NY, the site of thirteen homicides and one suicide.

On April 7, 2009, ABRA member company Bio Clean, Inc., of Lake Stevens, WA provided no cost biohazard cleaning services to a family in Graham, WA where five children were found fatally shot by their father, who then took his own life.

On April 22, 2009, ABRA member company SI Restoration of Baltimore, MD provided no cost biohazard cleaning services to families in Middletown, MD where a father killed his three children and wife before taking his own life.

On April 26, 2009 ABRA member company A1 BIO-Clean of Powder Springs, GA provided no cost biohazard cleaning services to the Athens Community Theatre (Town & Gown Players) in Athens, GA where three people were shot and killed and two others were wounded.

These services were provided at no cost, to aid the respected communities and allow them to begin the healing process.

ABRA member companies are available across the nation on a twenty-four basis to assist families and communities when a tragic event takes place.
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