Four months into his current job, Chris Topher had his
”
what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here?
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moment.
Four months into his current job, Chris Topher had his “what-the-heck-am-I-doing-here?” moment.
“I was in a bathroom where someone had passed away in a bathtub full of water,” said Topher, who has now been a cleaner with Orinda, Calif.-based Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. for six months. “He’d been in there a while because there were just chunks floating around in the water. I thought I’d seen everything, but this was just human soup. I just wanted to get out of there.”
Crime scene cleaners – the men and women who return homes, roadways and cars to some semblance of normalcy in the aftermath of tragedy – must be willing to experience, on a daily basis, the gruesome sights most people dread. Suicides, murders and decomposition are the staples of their trade. Most new employees never make it past eight months.
“There are many times when you’re standing in puddles of gore, with maggots crawling into your boots, and if you’re not strong of mind, you’re going to drop,” said Neal Smither, founder and owner of Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. “If they make it past that eight months, they generally stay for years.”
Smither, whose company is the main crime scene cleaner in Santa Clara County, got into the business nine years ago.
“I was waiting to become a mortician and I watched ‘Pulp Fiction,'” said Smither. “There was a scene where they shoot a guy in the back of a car, and they have to call in this guy Wolf to clean it all up. I figured, if I can stuff a body, I can clean a mess, so I started to look into it. There were people doing it, but no one was really that serious.”
For the first three years, times were lean. Jobs were slow, so Smither worked at an appliance store to make ends meet. Still, with low prices – sometimes hundreds less than the quotes of his competitors – and persistence, work began to appear more steadily.
Crime Scene Cleaners, Inc. now operates commercially in 18 states, and his employees clean crime scenes for law enforcement agencies nationwide. The company functions as an emergency response, just like police and firefighters, said Smither, whose workers handle between 120 and 170 cleanups per month. Calls come through an 800 number that weeds out people who are merely curious or who are obsessed with gore.
“They get rid of the nuts and the jobs come to me,” said Smither. “We go in, meet the family and look at the scene, then write it up and pitch it to the customer. It’s like any other business, that way.”
Unlike a regular sales job, Smither’s employees deal with families in crisis, blood, guts and disease.
“It’s just something that intimidates and scares the hell out of people,” said Smither. “You can get sick doing this. Hell, you can die.”
Most diseases present in a victim’s body disappear within 24 hours, according to Topher, but some infections – such as Hepatitis C – linger in dried blood for up to 36 hours after death.
To protect themselves from blood, bodily fluids and airborne diseases, Smither’s cleaners don gloves and full facial respirators and, sometimes, full-body protective suits. Trained for at least 40 hours in hazardous materials handling, they apply a mix of bleach, degreaser and enzyme compounds to any surfaces affected by the death.
In the home, this treatment usually involves ripping up the carpet and padding, then cleaning and deodorizing the sub-floor below.
“If you don’t get it all up, come next July you’re going to know because it’s going to smell bad, really bad,” said Smither, referring to the hot weather.
Smither’s teams apply a protein-devouring enzyme to bodily fluids, scrubbing the syrupy mixture onto sullied surfaces with wire brushes. The compound, a secret mix closely guarded by the company, acts like the acid in a person’s stomach, breaking down fluids while leaving carpets, beds and walls unscathed.
When the mess is cleaned – a process that usually takes around two hours and costs between $200 and $800 – technicians spray the area with expanding foam to soak up any cleaning solvents that remain. So long as the foam does not drip when squeezed, it is considered treated medical waste and can be dumped as a local landfill, said Smither. Other debris must be incinerated, said Topher.
One thing that’s harder to get rid of is the smell of decay, said Topher. Deodorizing bombs return a pleasant odor to a cleaned home, but the smell of death clings to technicians long after they’ve left.
“If I don’t ever do a job, I still wash my clothes at least twice because they still smell,” said Topher. “I shower at least five times a day, but a lot of it is in your head. I’ll go to a restaurant and smell some meat on the grill, and it might remind me of a decomp job I did the other day.”
Cleaners work five-day, 24-hour shifts with weekends off, said Smither, cleaning former meth labs as well as filthy homes, apartments and hotels in the down time between murders, suicides and accidental deaths. Basically, if a person doesn’t know how to clean something, the service may get a call, but they can never tell how busy they’ll be, he said.
“Historically, Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday are the best days for our business,” Smither said. “Right now it’s slow. The weather’s nice, so mom and dad are out having fun, and grandma and grandpa are laying there in a closed-up house waiting to be found.”
It may be morbid, but it is a job, said Topher.
“My job begins when your life ends,” he said.
Part III of our series continues Tuesday, Aug. 23 with a look at medical examiners.
