Crime Scene Cleaners Carve Out a Gory Niche
By Andrew Quinn
RICHMOND, Calif. (Reuters) - So, you’ve got brains splattered all over the kitchen, a decomposing corpse moldering on your sofa, a trail of bloody footprints leading down to the basement – and dinner guests due in an hour.
(Continued at http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000907/od/crimescene_dc_1.html)
Words fail me.
the link didn’t work for me, but looks like a take off on an earlier article in the alt-press here.
http://www.sfbg.com/SFLife/34/47/lead.html
Your link failed you too.
Allow me:
http://dailynews.yahoo.com/h/nm/20000907/od/crimescene_dc_1.html
Ooops, looks like OldScratch beat me to it.
Yes, I saw this article while skimming several websites for environmental news. (SF Examiner? NY Daily News? Dunno, after awhile all the media websites look the same.)
Nasty job, but someone has to do it. He just sounds like he enjoys the job a little too much, or that could be the reporter’s angle on the story.
Just glad I’m neither his client or um, on the other side of the broom.
Sorry for the URL error, that’ll teach me to parenthesize.
All together now, “Eewwwwwww.” But the entrepreneurial spirit is alive and well.
Screech-owl: I saw an interview with this guy a couple of months ago. Can’t remember what on. Anyway, I believe that him enjoying it was more of a story angle than anything else. From watching him on TV, it didn’t look to me like he necessarily enjoyed it, but he was earily calm talking about it. That’s not a job I could do, but somebody has too, right.
I always wondered what would happen at a crime scene - my worst thoughts were that relatives would have to come in afterwards and clean up. That would be horrible - a family member is murdered and you have to clean out the blood from the carpets of their apartment or something.
From the article though, it sounds like the bodies are still there? Aren’t they removed by the coroner or something?
My dad, the cop, always told me " I don’t care what you do for a living, but don’t work for ServiceMaster."
Why not? They’re the ones called to clean up after suicides, murders, etc.
Words to live by.
Actually, most of the big cities nowadays have companies just like this. Admittedly, it is a job that I would never want to do, but somebody has to do it, right? Three months ago, when my ex-husband’s grandmother died, I was at the home before the funeral came to collect the body. While she died naturally in her sleep, it still was left up to me and my ex to “clean up” the couch. See, when a person dies, their bladders and bowels empty themselves. Within minutes of the funeral home men leaving with her body, we were steam cleaning the couch. The rest of the family kept on saying about how calm and cool I was while undertaking this particular job, but you really have no idea how much I wanted to run to the bathroom to barf, and this is from a woman with four kids who has changed literally thousands of stinky diapers. I could only imagine how I would react if I came upon a bloody crime scene. If one of my family members to die horribly like that, I think I would rather have somebody else clean it up because I probably wouldn’t be in a very good frame of mind to do it myself.
These folks make some SERIOUS dollars!
I’ve heard that you they will remove carpet and whatever it takes. You will not find one drop or splatter of anything when they are done.
A friend of my Dads blew his brains out sitting in bed one night. No one gave it a second thought until his 19 year old daughter showed up to go through his things several days later. Luckily someone had the presence of mind to remove his things from the bedroom and close the door. I don’t know who ended up cleaning up the mess in a rental, but at least his daughter didn’t have to see it.
From the article:
I had to clean up an attempted murder for my best friend. Her brother had a knife plunged through his chest when the “devil” told the guy who was robbing him to go back and kill. It was a white carpet and the landlord would NOT refund his deposit without it being cleaned. The cost of having it cleaned was really high, so I tackled it with Shout and a scrub brush. ::shudder::
(He lived and is no worse for the wear, but he lost a LOT of blood)
Zette
This makes me think of other occupations like divers who retrieve bodies and people who sift through the rubble of collapsed buildings or crashed planes. How about the people looking for bodies in that gigantic trash heap that collapsed on a shanty town? Who are these amazing people? Where do their iron guts come from? It seems like they are never publicly thanked or even much considered. I certainly wouldn’t volunteer, but thank goodness someone does.
I know of at least one crime-scene cleaner who inherited the job. When he was a kid his mother was so poor they couldn’t afford a place to live, so negotiated with the owner of a house where an old woman and her numerous cats had died. They’d clean the mess (the woman had been dead for weeks, the cats for days) if they could live there afterwards.
The child cleaned too, and the mother decided she could handle making money that way. They started a business, which he now runs.
Amazing what you can push yourself to do when you’re really in need.
Old blood curdles. Thus, CURDLED, as Brach mentioned, is one most excellent video on this sort of thing.
do they make blood cheese, then?
Here’s a link to an excerpt from the book Gig- the same guy in the Yahoo link (Neal Smithers) writes about crime scene cleaning from his point of view.
-Jenny