Crime-scene cleanup requires technical, personal skills

Subtle eye needed to ensure work is completed properly

By JOHN PRZYBYS
LAS VEGAS REVIEW-JOURNAL
It's a question nobody ever wants to have to ask.

What happens after the homicide, or the suicide, or the death that nobody notices for days or even weeks? There's no way to put it delicately, but who cleans up the mess?

The answer: People such as John Gardner and David O'Brien, Southern Nevadans who own companies that specialize in the unusual, technically difficult and, well, just plain icky job of cleaning up crime scenes and other situations beyond the capabilities of traditional cleaners.

Most people "think the police will clean it up or the first responder -- the fire department -- will clean it up," says O'Brien, owner of Crime Scene Clean Team. But it is the survivors who must make the arrangements.

Specialized cleaners are required because blood, bodily fluids, bodily material and other residues are biohazards that can transmit infectious diseases. Consequently, cleaners must treat everything they come into contact with as potentially infectious, either to themselves or to a home's occupants.

The cleaners' workplace attire includes gloves, protective eyewear and booties at a minimum to disposable hazardous materials suits and respirators. After the job, those materials, along with paper towels and other contaminated items ranging from bloodied bed sheets to stained mattresses have to be treated as biomedical waste.

In addition to technical expertise, the job requires empathy and interpersonal skills. Cleaners work with people who have suffered a traumatic experience and, O'Brien says, the first thing his employees do on a job is to offer "our sincere condolences for their loss."

"It's not about the bucks. It's about helping those who need our services," says O'Brien, who has worked in the field for about eight years.

Particularly in cases of suicide or other deaths, "you have to have compassion for people," adds Gardner, owner of Absolute Decon Services.

The cleaners' work begins after receiving a call from a property owner, if the crime or cleanup scene involves private property, or a law enforcement officer or similar official if it involves a street or another form of public property.

Barbara Morgan, a Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department public information officer, says the department has contracts with two companies for crime scene and building cleanups and another for cleanups that involve motor vehicle accidents.

But, she notes, officers don't recommend specific cleanup companies to the public because such a recommendation could be seen as an endorsement. So, finding a service falls on the survivor, via the phone book or Google.

After police officers, crime scene investigators and coroner's officials have finished with their jobs, a cleaner will assess the damage and offer a cost estimate. Costs vary, but Gardner says most jobs begin at about $400. Homeowners' insurance often covers the cost, he adds.

The cleaners' arsenal includes disinfectants, disposable towels, high-pressure cleaners, vacuums, a few specialized chemicals -- one that, for instance, can reveal hidden blood on surfaces -- machines that remove smoke and odors, and ample elbow grease.

It requires a subtle eye. For example, Gardner says, "you have to make sure there's no blood under the flooring. If there's blood on the carpet, you have to take the piece of carpet up, and if there's blood in the subfloor, you have to take that piece up."

"You have to look for the invisible, because if you don't get the invisible, eventually it's going to start stinking in the house and be a health hazard," Gardner says, adding a typical job takes from one to six hours.

"We get a lot of people who pass away of natural causes and are left unattended, and several weeks go by," O'Brien says. Then, the cleaning job involves removing products of the body's natural decomposition process, and can include handling insect infestation.

Ideally, the work is done with little or no damage to the home. Ultimately, O'Brien says, "we bring it back to its pre-existing condition as if (the incident) never happened."

Gardner estimates that about 40 percent of his business is crime-scene cleanups. The remainder involves cleaning up after suicides, industrial accidents, floods or fires and auto accidents, or dealing with what he describes on his business card as "gross filth."

"We clean up (after) hoarders," Gardner explains. "You'd be surprised. You have a lot of biohazards in some of those."

And, yes, Gardner says, "we work with some of the casinos. There are scenes their people can't clean up."

O'Brien estimates that 95 percent of his company's work involves trauma, albeit not all of the crime-related kind. He also operates a school for prospective crime scene cleaners that includes an online course and two days of hands-on training. The curriculum includes classes in such areas as hazardous materials, blood-borne pathogens and even terrorism, he says.

It's a specialized industry. There is "a lot of work out there, but there are also a lot of companies out there now," Gardner says, noting he has seen an increase from four companies when he started six years ago to "at least 10 others" now.

But it's not a job for everybody. Gardner says he has had hires who "decided they couldn't do it."

The intensity of the job can be difficult. "I guess the hardest ones for me is teenage suicide," Gardner says, "because it's a teenager, and I just feel that it's a life that shouldn't be taken."

The job can be rewarding, too, O'Brien says. "People with tears in their eyes, they come and say, 'Thank you.' That alone is priceless."

The satisfaction, Gardner says, lies in doing a job nobody wants to do, but which somebody has to, and doing it well.

"You get satisfaction that you're helping people through a dilemma they don't care to face," he says. "Whether you like it or not, it's got to be done."

6 reasons why people commit suicide

by Alex Lickerman, MD

Though I’ve never lost a friend or family member to suicide, I have lost a patient.

I have known a number of people left behind by the suicide of people close to them, however. Given how much losing my patient affected me, I’ve only been able to guess at the devastation these people have experienced. Pain mixed with guilt, anger, and regret makes for a bitter drink, the taste of which I’ve seen take many months or even years to wash out of some mouths.

The one question everyone has asked without exception, that they ache to have answered more than any other, is simply, why?


Why did their friend, child, parent, spouse, or sibling take their own life? Even when a note explaining the reasons is found, lingering questions usually remain: yes, they felt enough despair to want to die, but why did they feel that? A person’s suicide often takes the people it leaves behind by surprise (only accentuating survivor’s guilt for failing to see it coming).

People who’ve survived suicide attempts have reported wanting not so much to die as to stop living, a strange dichotomy but a valid one nevertheless. If some in-between state existed, some other alternative to death, I suspect many suicidal people would take it. For the sake of all those reading this who might have been left behind by someone’s suicide, I wanted to describe how I was trained to think about the reasons people kill themselves. They’re not as intuitive as most think.

In general, people try to kill themselves for six reasons:

1. They’re depressed. This is without question the most common reason people commit suicide. Severe depression is always accompanied by a pervasive sense of suffering as well as the belief that escape from it is hopeless. The pain of existence often becomes too much for severely depressed people to bear. The state of depression warps their thinking, allowing ideas like “Everyone would all be better off without me” to make rational sense. They shouldn’t be blamed for falling prey to such distorted thoughts any more than a heart patient should be blamed for experiencing chest pain: it’s simply the nature of their disease.

Because depression, as we all know, is almost always treatable, we should all seek to recognize its presence in our close friends and loved ones. Often people suffer with it silently, planning suicide without anyone ever knowing. Despite making both parties uncomfortable, inquiring directly about suicidal thoughts in my experience almost always yields an honest response. If you suspect someone might be depressed, don’t allow your tendency to deny the possibility of suicidal ideation prevent you from asking about it.

2. They’re psychotic. Malevolent inner voices often command self-destruction for unintelligible reasons. Psychosis is much harder to mask than depression — and arguably even more tragic. The worldwide incidence of schizophrenia is 1% and often strikes otherwise healthy, high-performing individuals, whose lives, though manageable with medication, never fulfill their original promise.

Schizophrenics are just as likely to talk freely about the voices commanding them to kill themselves as not, and also, in my experience, give honest answers about thoughts of suicide when asked directly. Psychosis, too, is treatable, and usually must be for a schizophrenic to be able to function at all. Untreated or poorly treated psychosis almost always requires hospital admission to a locked ward until the voices lose their commanding power.

3. They’re impulsive. Often related to drugs and alcohol, some people become maudlin and impulsively attempt to end their own lives. Once sobered and calmed, these people usually feel emphatically ashamed. The remorse is usually genuine, and whether or not they’ll ever attempt suicide again is unpredictable. They may try it again the very next time they become drunk or high, or never again in their lifetime. Hospital admission is therefore not usually indicated. Substance abuse and the underlying reasons for it are generally a greater concern in these people and should be addressed as aggressively as possible.

4. They’re crying out for help, and don’t know how else to get it. These people don’t usually want to die but do want to alert those around them that something is seriously wrong. They often don’t believe they will die, frequently choosing methods they don’t think can kill them in order to strike out at someone who’s hurt them—but are sometimes tragically misinformed. The prototypical example of this is a young teenage girl suffering genuine angst because of a relationship, either with a friend, boyfriend, or parent who swallows a bottle of Tylenol—not realizing that in high enough doses Tylenol causes irreversible liver damage.

I’ve watched more than one teenager die a horrible death in an ICU days after such an ingestion when remorse has already cured them of their desire to die and their true goal of alerting those close to them of their distress has been achieved.

5. They have a philosophical desire to die. The decision to commit suicide for some is based on a reasoned decision often motivated by the presence of a painful terminal illness from which little to no hope of reprieve exists. These people aren’t depressed, psychotic, maudlin, or crying out for help. They’re trying to take control of their destiny and alleviate their own suffering, which usually can only be done in death. They often look at their choice to commit suicide as a way to shorten a dying that will happen regardless. In my personal view, if such people are evaluated by a qualified professional who can reliably exclude the other possibilities for why suicide is desired, these people should be allowed to die at their own hands.

6. They’ve made a mistake. This is a recent, tragic phenomenon in which typically young people flirt with oxygen deprivation for the high it brings and simply go too far. The only defense against this, it seems to me, is education.

The wounds suicide leaves in the lives of those left behind by it are often deep and long lasting. The apparent senselessness of suicide often fuels the most significant pain survivors feel. Thinking we all deal better with tragedy when we understand its underpinnings, I’ve offered the preceding paragraphs in hopes that anyone reading this who’s been left behind by a suicide might be able to more easily find a way to move on, to relinquish their guilt and anger, and find closure. Despite the abrupt way you may have been left, those don’t have to be the only two emotions you’re doomed to feel about the one who left you.

Alex Lickerman is an internal medicine physician at the University of Chicago who blogs at Happiness in this World.