Report details conditions where woman found living with decomposed mother; neighbors not surprised

FORT MYERS — When Lee County Sheriff’s Deputy James Didio went to Gail Andrews’ Fort Myers home to check her wellbeing early this month, deputies smelled the strong odor of urine and rotting food.

“We could smell this all the way to the road,” Didio wrote in his report about the June 4 check on St. Andrews Circle. “I approached the house and looked in the open front window to see a house full of trash. Crawling over the trash were rats and mice that jumped when I shined my light.”

Trash was strewn all over the bedroom and Didio spotted Andrews, who explained she’d been cleaning. Asked if she lived alone, she said her father had died 10 years ago — and her mother had moved back to Connecticut.

It took more than a week — and a search warrant — for investigators to dig through the trash and find her mother’s skeleton Friday.

And so began an investigation into a bizarre case of a daughter keeping her mother’s death a secret for more than a year. Neighbors weren’t surprised.

“We didn’t know for sure, but we all suspected she died in there,” said Peggy Ward, who last saw Gladys Andrews 10 years ago, while another neighbor saw her five years ago. “She always talked like her mother was alive.”

Tina DeVecchis said she’d complained for two decades, reporting garbage, rats, junk cars, screaming raccoons, caged cats, and foul odors.

“When people call Code Enforcement and they do nothing for 20 years, they could have prevented this problem,” DeVeccchis said. “The rats were huge. She left her mother on the floor. They ate her mother.”

Now, the county medical examiner and a forensic anthropologist are working to confirm the skeleton is Gladys Andrews, who would have been 88 if alive, and how long she's been dead.

“We are still investigating, but we don’t believe foul play was involved,” said Sheriff’s Office spokesman John Sheehan.

Andrews told the News-Press her mother died 14 months ago and the home was in bad shape, she didn’t want to lose it, so she didn’t report it.

On Tuesday, the Lee County Community Development Department slapped a sign on the home, “Unsafe building,” and deputies escorted Gail Andrews inside to get a few belongings.

The sign begins a 60-day process for Andrews to dispute condemnation proceedings. With yellow crime-scene tape still up, code enforcement officers still haven’t been allowed inside.

“The vermin and garbage were enough to deem it unsafe,” said Community Development Spokeswoman Joan LaGuardia, adding that tarps covered the roof. “Legally, we can’t keep her out of it.”

Property records show the two-bedroom, one-bathroom home purchased in 1974 was placed in both Gail and Gladys Andrewses’ names after her father, Andrew John Andrews, died Jan. 25, 1999, at 83.

The sheriff’s report says trash reached 2-feet high, the floor wasn’t visible, and healthy cats were caged.

“I counted at least 10 to 15 full-grown rats in the living room and could hear them in the bedrooms,” Didio wrote. “The walls and trash were covered with roaches and bugs. Some of the roaches were more than an inch long. They were even coming out of the A/C vents.”

At least since 2001, Andrews has been cited for code violations.

“Two times we had to go out there and clean up accumulated trash,” LaGuardia said. “But she would not permit access to the inside.”

Without probable cause, belief that a crime occurred, LaGuardia said a property owner can prohibit anyone from coming inside.

“It’s not uncommon with an eccentric owner for an outside to appear manageable and an inside to be a mystery,” LaGuardia said, adding, however, “There’s never been a case with a dead body. That’s what makes this case remarkable.”

“She will have to improve the safety conditions,” LaGuardia said, adding, however, that Andrews conceded she doesn’t have the money to save her home.

Ward said deputies said the ceilings had caved in and wires hung down. “She told me she nearly froze in the winter because it was so cold and once it got hot, she said she couldn’t do anything,” Ward said.

Ward agreed Andrews wasn’t “mainstream,” but called the former Lee County teacher intelligent, articulate, an animal lover who had little money from her pension check but gave Ward’s grandchildren small gifts for Christmas and Easter.

However, her love for animals extended to the stray cats and rats she fed. She admitted 10 dead cats found inside were accumulated over many years. “She said she didn’t have the money to cremate them or dispose of them properly and didn’t want to throw them out with the trash,” Ward said.

After Andrews allowed DCF investigators inside Friday, she was committed to the Ruth Cooper Center. Before her release Monday, she called Ward, who paid for a $16 taxi ride home. But due to neighbors’ contentious relationship over the odors, rats and garbage, her family didn’t want Andrews staying there.

She begged for a pillow, a flashlight and a hose to wash. “She slept in my grandson’s fort,” Ward said, adding that she gave the vegetarian food and let her inside for breakfast.

She’s since moved to a neighbor’s home; that neighbor couldn’t be reached for comment.

“She’s had it rough,” Ward said of Andrews leaving her job to care for her father and her mother becoming bedridden after falling a week later. “You’d have to be a hard-hearted person not to have sympathy for her.”

DCF officials referred her to other agencies for help.

“When we have cases of hoarding, we will work with the adult to see if we can get services in place to help that person,” said DCF Spokeswoman Erin Gillespie. “However, adults must give permission and allow us to help — unless they are found incompetent to make decisions on their own.”

Andrews would not tell reporters if she was cashing her mother's Social Security checks, and Sheehan, of the Sheriff's Office, declined to say if they're investigating that.

Jon Lasher, a spokesman for the Social Security Administration, also couldn't comment.

"We often conduct investigations involving living persons who conceal the death of a relative in order to continue receiving the deceased’s Social Security benefits," Lasher said. "When our investigations prove such an allegation to be true, we pursue all available criminal, civil and administrative remedies in order to recover the stolen funds and bring the individual to justice."

Not your typical cleaning ladies

By Jacqueline Green


When Estates residents Alice Jackson and Tracy Gunn are asked that common question, "What do you do for a living?" their answer shocks most people.

That's because these best friends are the owners and operators of Scene Clean, a crime and trauma scene cleanup service.

Although their service deals primarily with murder and unattended death, Jackson and Gunn handle any clean-up that involves bio-hazardous materials from suicides to homeless camps.

The two established Scene Clean three years ago. They both worked in the cleaning industry and shared an interest in forensics. The business caters to crime scenes from Orlando to the Florida Keys.

"Families tend to think that the police handle crime scene clean up but that's not the case," Gunn explains, "Most families do not know where to turn and are left to handle the cleanup themselves, which can be very traumatizing when dealing with grief." In fact, all calls received by Scene Clean come from family members or friends of the deceased. The police only aid them by giving the families a reference list of local cleaning companies who specialize in bio-hazard disposal. For most situations, Gunn says Scene Clean is at the top of the list.

"We are meeting these families on the worst day of their lives, so when we communicate with them we chose our words very carefully," says Gunn. Even in introductions, she says she's hesitant to give her full name because hearing the word, "gun" can arouse an emotional response.

In most cases, she uses her maiden name.

On occasion, the women aid sheriff and police officials in their investigations by finding forensic evidence that could have been overlooked. To this date however, they haven't found anything that was considered vital evidence in an investigation.

When asked about the worst scene they've worked, Jackson and Gunn recalled a case involving an elderly man.

"He had passed away and was not found for a month," says Jackson. "He had about 25 to 30 cats and most of the cats had died as well from starvation. The remaining cats were feasting on the deceased cats when we arrived. Needless to say it was a mess, and the smell of decomposition had attached itself to everything in the residence." The two say the most rewarding part of their unusual job is aiding families at the worst possible time.

"They don't make a bio-hazard suit to protect you from the emotions that come with this job," Gunn says, "but knowing we are bringing relief to the families is a reward in itself." She says trauma clean-up is not something anyone thinks of until they are dealing with the loss of a loved one.

For Jackson this is something that hits close to home.

"I can sympathize with the victims because I lost both of my parents," she says. "I can see their grief and I can relate." According to Gunn, Scene Clean is the only locally-owned trauma cleanup company. She says they also work with insurance companies and offer discounted rates to uninsured customers in need.

'Hoarders' keep one Tampa Bay business busy

TAMPA, FL -- Hoarding is an obsessive-compulsive disorder marked by an inability to throw things away.

It's a hot topic these days, from national talk shows like Oprah to a series on cable television, and one local business is keeping busy because of the spotlight on the problem.

So many, it's hard to imagine anyone walking through the room without trouble.

"Everybody has a different thing that they like to hoard and his particular thing was beer cans and newspapers," said Laura Spaulding.

The disorder called "hoarding" is keeping Spaulding busy. She's cleaned up loads of clutter from hundreds of homes across Florida and beyond.

It's not easy or clean work but the jobs have been plentiful for Spaulding who owns a professional crime scene cleanup company called Spaulding Decon.

She takes on two or more hoarding cleanup jobs a week, compared to just one per month about a year ago.

"You just kinda start at the beginning, work your way all the way to the back of the house. It really helps if there are family members there. They can calm down an individual who has the disorder or remove them from the home until we get it done," Spaulding says.

"It's a memory for them. Something tied in with something important but it's of no value if you look at it from a distance," said Dr. Walter Afield, a Tampa Bay psychiatrist.

Dr. Afield says hoarding can be a symptom of mental illness including dementia or something more serious. He explains many times, it's elderly shut-ins who become hoarders and their families become burdened with cleaning up the mess.

She says it took two days to clean that Tampa apartment filled with aluminum cans. When they were done, she took 160-pounds of aluminum to a recycling yard.

"Some of them have issues with letting it go. Even though it looks like trash to me, they are very attached to it," Spaulding points out. But whether the number of hoarder cases is increasing in Tampa Bay is hard to say.

Cleaning up is Purdy's business

By Darlene Schnittker
St Augustine Record

Combine the elements of two current television shows -- "Dirty Jobs" with Mike Rowe and "CSI" -- and you have a pretty good description of Mark Purdy's job as a bio-recovery technician.

The focus of Purdy's job is to decontaminate and disinfect crime and trauma scenes. It is a dirty job, but, as anticipated, Purdy said, "Somebody has to do it."

"I feel as if I was called to do this," he said. "I thoroughly enjoy my job."

Purdy is available 24 hours a day. Most of his trauma calls are for suicide cleanup. After a crime or trauma occurs, detectives, EMTs, and evidence technicians perform their duties. A homeowner or business owner then contacts Purdy so he can provide the necessary clean up.

"I try to make it as convenient and discreet as possible for people," said Purdy.

For example, when he is called to a hotel for clean up after a trauma, he will wear regular clothing in the public areas of the hotel. He then enters the room, puts up the Do Not Disturb sign, then dons his hazardous material gear. This includes a disposable suit, a face mask and two pairs of gloves, which get taped to his sleeve to avoid contamination.

Purdy also wears a mask to avoid the smell. Sometimes he deals with bodies that are decomposing. A decomposing body swells and bacteria seep through the skin, leaking on to surfaces such as floors, mattresses, couches and walls.

Care must be taken to avoid bacteria and clean areas as much as possible.

Aside from the bodily fluids, the chemical used by the evidence technicians in fingerprinting the crime scene is extremely difficult to remove.

Purdy first takes pictures of the trauma scene and assesses the situation. He cleans from the worst area outward, decontaminating as he works. He uses enzymes to loosen up stain, a surfactant, a disinfectant and finally, a tuberculocide.

If liquid has pooled and has saturated the material, it will need to be removed, as it cannot be decontaminated. Purdy cuts material to fit in to a red hazardous material bag for disposal.

If a mattress has to be disposed, he cuts off the material, bags it, then decontaminates the metal springs and disposes of it.

Purdy will often use an ozone machine, which creates an 0 3 molecule, which, in turn, joins with an oxygen molecule to create a reaction that helps dissipate any odors.

"It makes the room smell like rain," said Purdy.

After the site has been cleaned and decontaminated, Purdy takes another set of pictures. Many times, according to Purdy, the homeowners are covered for this service under their insurance.

Purdy's work vehicle is set up to stage decontaminated materials for disposal. A portion of his truck is lined with Linix to transport the bio-hazardous material. He labels his truck while transporting this material to a state-approved facility where it will be incinerated.

Purdy decontaminates all of his equipment and truck and begins anew.

To become certified as a bio-recovery technician, Purdy attended a National Institute of Decontamination Specialists (NIDS) school in South Carolina. It is a hands-on training program that teaches students the proper techniques for bio-recovery clean-up, including what tools to use, which chemicals to use for specific situations and other safety issues.

On the last day of class, the owner of a slaughterhouse brings in pieces of cattle carcasses and the instructor sets up various scenarios in a makeshift house to enact trauma scenes. Students then role play and critique each other on the skills they have learned.

Mark Purdy of St. Johns BioRecovery may be reached 24 hours a day at 501-6412. His Web site is www.stjohnsbiorecovery.com.

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.

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.
CONTACT US TOLL FREE: 888-979-2272

RELEASE: Statement from Town and Gown Players

ATHENS (MyFOX ATLANTA) - The three people we lost yesterday were a part of the rich 50-year history of this theater and, more than that, were vital members of the Town and Gown family.

Ben Teague, loving husband of UGA's Dr. Fran Teague for more than 40 years, was not only a friend but also a father figure to all at the theater. One would be hard pressed to find a Town and Gowner who had not learned at least one life lesson from this wise and kind hearted man. His wife wishes to say, "Yesterday Ben was murdered, which is hard to comprehend and impossible to accept. It was a beautiful day, however, and he was in his favorite place with the people he loved." Ben was a translator of German, Russian and English.

Marie Bruce was the binding force that held the Town and Gown community together. Having worked with Town and Gown for over 20 years, at one time or another she served in every capacity at the theater, artistically and administratively, from leading lady to president of the board to chief cook and bottle washer. A local attorney, Marie was the mother of two young children.

A gentle presence, Tom Tanner breathed life into every corner of Town and Gown through his quiet diligence and astounding creativity - most would call him genius. Father of an equally amazing daughter, Tom would tell you that while he enjoyed his work as director of the Regional Dynamics Economic Modeling Laboratory at Clemson University, his heart lived and thrived in the theater.

Ben, Marie and Tom were a part of our family, and as painful as their loss is for us, we know it is even more painful for their families. We want to extend our deepest sympathy to their immediate family and close friends outside the theater community. There are no words we can use to adequately express our grief.

We would like to thank the Athens Police department and the media for their respectful treatment of this tragedy. We want to thank the American Bio Recovery Association and A1 BIO-Clean Service for the generous donation of their services in our time of need. We also want to thank the Athens Community for their support. This tragedy effects everyone in the community in some way, and we know you share in our loss. We ask that the media continue to be respectful of our privacy during this difficult time.

Cleanup completed at Civic Association

April 5, 2009

Cleanup has been completed at the American Civic Association building in Binghamton, where a gunman killed 13 people and injured four before taking his own life Friday.

The American Bio-Recovery Association, a non-profit international association of crime and trauma scene professionals, said Sunday that the bio-recovery cleaning was complete. The Ipswich, Mass.-based group provided the service at no cost.

Two member companies, Disaster Clean Up of Endwell and the Bio-Recovery Corporation of New York City, donated labor and supplies to remediate the scene with a crew of six technicians.

Bio-Recovery Corporation Aids In Binghamton Crime Scene Cleanup

PRESS RELEASE
April 5th 2009

Bio-Recovery Corporation of New York City and Diaster Scene Cleanup of Endwell, NY responded to the American Civic Association on April 5th 2009 at the request of the American Bio-Recovery Association to aid the American Civic Association and the entire Binghamton community with the cleanup of the crime scene left in the aftermath of Fridays multiple homicide, suicide at their offices located at 131 Front St Binghamton, NY.

At the request of Dale Cillian, President of the non profit American Bio-Recovery Association (ABRA), the two named companies above provided all the labor and equipment to complete this cleanup in one day at no cost to the American Civic Association. "I couldn't have done this without you guys," stated Andrew Baranoski, Executive Director of the non-profit American Civic Association.

The American Bio Recovery Association, an international association of Crime & Trauma Scene Cleanup professionals strives to make these services available to all that require it throughout the United States.