⋅Facing the Aftermath⋅
Many people don’t realize that in most jurisdictions, police, homicide investigators, and crime-scene investigators do not clean up the carnage left after a murder, accident, or suicide. When officials complete their investigation, they remove the body to the coroner’s office or county hospital and don’t touch the scene itself. They leave the results of a death and its emotionally traumatic, hazardous cleanup to the family. Most people learn this fact after a tragedy, when they are least prepared to face the horrific job of walking into the death scene of someone they love and cleaning up the shocking and dangerous mess.
The Emotionally Traumatic Impact
In a previous post, we discussed the danger of deadly pathogens. Here we will discuss another important reason to leave death-scene cleanups to the professionals: Emotional Trauma
You are already devastated by your loss and overwhelmed with the sudden responsibilities of handling your loved one’s affairs. The last thing you need is to cement and prolong your devastation by plunging yourself into the gruesome crime or death-scene. Advanced Bio Treatment can professionally and compassionately handle this terrible job for you, from start to finish.
We can spare you any presence at all in the environment and its accompanying emotional trauma until that environment is completely restored.
Most people who knew and loved the deceased are not emotionally or mentally prepared to walk into the death scene and begin the grueling task of removing the gruesome remnants of the violence their loved one met. Most people have no idea what a death or crime scene is really like. In addition to the severe health risks posed by the scene of a violent death, the sights and smells of the scene are almost always overwhelming and emotionally devastating.
Blood, bodily fluids, and organ and bone fragments are often not removed to the coroner’s office with the body.
The death scene is replete with shocking bits and pieces of the tragedy that unfolded there. Walls, furniture, and other furnishings are often destroyed and covered with blood and other biological material.
Most people are unprepared not only for what they see at a crime or death scene but also for what they smell. The most shocking photo can’t reproduce the smells of a death scene, a smell you can never forget. And those smells permeate the whole environment – the walls, floors, furniture, linens, drapery, even the clothing of people who enter the environment – and they don’t disappear when the body is removed. A body begins to decompose within minutes of death, along with any biological material on floors, walls, and furniture. The smell of that decomposition is something you can never forget. Blood has an unmistakable odor, especially when it soaks into upholstery, bed linens, walls, and floors. Bodies also excrete urine and feces at death, which often soak into furnishings, begin to decompose, and emit toxic odors.
The odors of any death scene, especially a violent one, can be devastating enough to induce vomiting and unconsciousness.
An untrained person will not know how to mitigate these odors sufficiently to work in this environment for hours. An untrained person also does not have access to the specialized clothing, gear, and equipment trained professionals use as part of their daily work routine. ABT’s trained professionals wear filtered respirators to mitigate the death-scene odors while they work, and they use hydroxyl generators to remove all traces of lingering odors in the environment.
Our job as professional crime-scene cleaners is to understand your feelings and to remove this emotionally traumatic job from the long list of things you will have to do after losing a loved one.
You can then concentrate your efforts on that important list while we concentrate ours on professionally restoring the environment to a clean, safe state so that when you enter that environment later to remove personal possessions and prepare the home or apartment for sale or rent, there will be no reminders of the tragedy that took place there.
If the unthinkable happens to you or to someone you know, please call the professionals at Advanced Bio Treatment. We can relieve loved ones of the emotionally traumatic experience of a crime-scene cleanup, and we will do more than a cursory clean up. We know how to walk into an environment full of bio-hazards, safely contain them, remove them or clean them, and completely decontaminate a death scene following all OSHA, EPA, and state health department guidelines, to make it safe for loved ones to enter and to live in again.
