⋅The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly⋅
Every job has a story. It has real people who have usually experienced a crisis or catastrophic tragedy. One way to emotionally detach from the work we do is to know as little as possible about the victims.
But that’s easier said than done. Family members of the victims are often on the scene with us at some point. At the very least, they are on the sidelines.
The Good
Most of the family members whom we encounter show visible signs of stress and grief. Some cry. Some become hysterical. Some even collapse. Some want to talk about what happened. Part of a crime-scene cleaner’s job involves listening, empathizing, and showing compassion and kindness.
But there is, on occasion, a whole different breed of reaction to tragedy that leaves the most seasoned crime-scene cleaner dumbfounded.
In all my years as a crime-scene cleaner, I am never prepared for these bizarre encounters with the family members of victims.
The Bad
On one hoarding cleanup, we watched a hoarder’s daughter scream and curse at her 70-year-old mother repeatedly throughout the day as her mother refused to throw belongings away.
Utterly frustrated, the daughter ripped apart a box of magazines that were covered in rat feces and threw them all over the lawn.
She then ran into the house and began hurling boxes of belongings out a second-story window, sending glass and other breakables inside those boxes plummeting to the ground where they violently shattered all over the sidewalk. A week later, the hoarder hung herself.
I remember one unattended death cleanup where an 81-year-old man had been dead for three to four weeks inside his home.
His neighbor had reported a foul odor coming from the house, and the coroner had removed the victim’s body just a few hours before we arrived.
The victim’s daughter approached us outside the home three times during the cleanup, impatiently asking us how much longer it would be until she could get inside the home and remove a few personal belongings. When we told her that we should be finished by late that afternoon, she complained that it was too inconvenient to return and that she’d have to cancel her hair appointment. She lived less than 5 miles away. I couldn’t help but wonder why she never once checked on this old man over the past few weeks as he lay dead.
The Ugly
A few years back, we were called to clean up a crime scene in an old family farm house that sat on 100 acres of land south of Atlanta. The home was part of the estate left by the victim’s grandfather, and the victim had made arrangements to live there temporarily after his divorce. The victim was a middle-aged man who had been shot several times in the head and back, so the scene was extremely bloody and also a bio-hazard.
After the scene was released by investigators, we were hired by the victim’s cousin who was the executrix of the estate.
Her instructions were to clean up “the really ugly gore,” as she called it, but not to touch the black fingerprint powder and to leave a little blood because she was hosting a Halloween party there at the end of the month.
We were hired once to clean up an apparent accident or suicide in a high-rise condominium in the upscale Buckhead area of Atlanta. An intoxicated 20-year-old attending a party on the 17th floor had jumped or fallen from a balcony and landed on the rooftop terrace of an adjacent building ten stories below. The scene was one of the worst I have ever worked. It had been cordoned off by police for a day or two while they investigated the circumstances, and then the building manager contacted us to do the cleanup.
As soon as we got there, several excited, giggling teenage girls appeared on the terrace and rushed toward us. As the group gathered near the accident site, one of the girls whipped out a cell phone and pleaded with one of our stunned cleaners to pose with the group for pictures.
As I frantically radioed building security, the girls were already posing and giggling in front of the gory scene and had snapped several pictures by the time security got to the terrace and forced them to leave.
“We didn’t do anything wrong!” one of them insisted. “We loved Jami. We just want to have something to remember her by! Besides, she would’ve just LOVED this! She was a total Goth!”
We hope you never encounter the kind of tragedy that requires our assistance, but if the unthinkable happens, Advanced Bio Treatment is available 24/7/365. We adhere to all OSHA, federal, and state guidelines to insure a professional, thorough job, and we work with your insurance company. Please call us at 800-295-1684.
