"let the healing begin"
English / Español
Cleaning up after death is a job better suited for James Cheyne than you.
Sunday, July 16, 2006
BY JIM MOORE
Copyright © 2006 Republican-American
NEW HAVEN -- The smell of death was cloying, unexpectedly sickly-sweet. The foul odor made its presence known on the second-floor landing of the apartment building, with still another set of stairs to climb.
James Cheyne of Southington was here early on a Saturday morning to do a job most professional cleaners refuse: He is a professional death scene cleaner.
It was shortly after sunrise, and grieving family members soon would arrive to collect treasured possessions of a person whose death passed unnoticed for days in an apartment without air conditioning. The police and the coroner left a few hours before Cheyne's arrival, taking the body with them. But physical remains were left behind, unpleasant byproducts of decomposition.
"I'm glad they left these towels behind," Cheyne said. "This is quite messy."
A large pool of brackish fluid was folded within an overturned air mattress. Its unfolding sent a powerful stench surging through the room. A television blared in the background, half-empty fast food containers perched on tables, a writer's outline was tacked to a wall, clothes were left to dry on a rack in the kitchen -- signs of a life interrupted, testimony that tomorrow is promised to no one.
"No bugs ... that's a nice find," Cheyne said.
Cheyne, 33, recently completed another job in Winsted, where he spent hours in a tear-gas clouded Torringford Street apartment the day after a despondent George Pelletier took his own life with a shotgun following a 16-hour standoff with police.
In business for just over a year, Cheyne plies his little-known trade throughout southern New England, with a focus on Connecticut. There is plenty of work, but jobs can be hard to come by: "The land of steady habits" is a state reluctant to openly discuss both crime and death.
"It's not an industry you talk about," Cheyne said. "We're an after-hours business that does afterthought things."
Biohazard remediation is a serious business, both in removing potential health hazards associated with human remains, and in sparing family and friends a gruesome task. Cheyne said the best part of his job is "when you can turn over a safe house to somebody, and not have it spark memories of that event."
Cleaning, healing
TraumAway BioRecovery Services, LLC, operated out of Cheyne's home, advertises with a tag line, "Let the healing begin." Conn Trauma, LLC of New London, the only other Connecticut company that specializes in removing hazardous biological remains from death scenes, advertises in the phone book under the category "restoration contractors."
The industry dates only to the mid-1990s, with few practitioners, growing demand, and a near-complete lack of governmental oversight.
Kent Berg of Greenville, S.C., founded the American Bio-Recovery Association in 1996, when there were perhaps only a dozen specialized companies in the country. The number has grown to about 500 nationwide, Berg said, with another 500 or so that clean death scenes as a sideline.
"We even know of pressure washing companies that do it on the side," Berg said. "For the most part they don't have any training."
Berg and Cheyne said that all too often a grieving family is left with a task that is dangerous to both the physical body and to the psyche.
"A woman came home to find her husband had slit his wrists and basically bled out in the laundry room, and she had to clean it up," Berg said. "It was an unbelievably large amount of blood ... She said, 'I had to scoop that up and flush it down the toilet... and you have no idea what that does to you, to know that is the life blood of the person you have loved and lived with, and you are flushing it down the toilet."
Years passed and the woman remarried, moved on, but can never forget. "She tells me, 'I wake up in the middle of the night sometimes, thinking about that blood… I've gotten over the death, but I can't get over that cleanup.'"
Cheyne and his wife, Marilyn, 31, who helps her husband clean in her spare time, know of several cases, including teen suicides, when parents or loved ones were forced to clean up.
"These people are grieving," James Cheyne said. "They walk back in and find whatever spread across the walls. The smell gets them at the door... a good attitude and bleach? It's not enough."
Curiosity, sensitivity
Marilyn Cheyne shares her husband's passion for helping others and his addiction to the television show "CSI," which dramatizes crime investigations. Curiosity seekers often call after seeing the TraumAway truck on the road, she said.
"It's not your ordinary thing," Marilyn Cheyne said as she prepared to follow her husband up the stairs in New Haven. "You do kind of step back and think, 'What? How did I get into this?' "
James Cheyne was exposed to death at a young age by his mother, who worked for 26 years in a Pennsylvania county coroner's office. His father was a pioneer in blood plasma extraction. Cheyne's training includes a three-year stint working for Clean Harbors, a hazardous waste remediation company, and an emergency medical technician training program with American Medical Response in Waterbury.
Early in 2004, Cheyne decided to roll down his personal protective sleeves and go to it. After a year of apprenticeship working for a bio-recovery company in Pennsylvania, Cheyne spent about $25,000 buying specialized equipment such as a high-temperature steam cleaner to disinfect, and an ozone machine to remove odors, along with various specialized disinfectants, chemicals that indicate the presence of blood, and the sign for his truck.
"That's typical," Berg said of Cheyne's initial outlay.
Cheyne obtained federal blood and blood-borne pathogen certification through an online learning program, and developed an exposure control plan, hazardous contamination plan, and a hazardous communication plan which details how to talk to other people in a room where everyone is covered head-to-toe in white plastic-lined suits, wearing masks and face shields. Cheyne was vaccinated against Hepatitis B, a three-step process, and obtained a million-dollar insurance policy. All of these are required to obtain American Bio-Recovery Association affiliation, which Cheye said he hopes to achieve later this year, as soon as he can schedule formalized training offered by the organization.
"It's the gold standard," Cheyne said of the training, which Berg said covers everything from microbiology to stress management to grief counseling. "You may walk into the class not knowing a microbe from a lug wrench, but when you leave, you'll know more than 75 percent of the companies in this country," Berg said.
The vast majority of practitioners, perhaps 18 out of every 20 by Berg's estimate, lack essential knowledge about specific disinfectants, for example, such as how exactly they work, and which ones work best in which situations.
The service can be expensive, depending on the situation, and how much must be cleaned up. Some jobs require chipping away concrete, or replacing drywall. Any mattress, fabric, or other porous material contaminated by bodily fluids of any kind must be cut to pieces, double-bagged in red biohazard bags, and then sealed in a cardboard box with the same markings. Those boxes are then locked in secure containers for transport to a licensed medical waste disposal facility for incineration.
The total cost can range from $800 to $5,000, depending on the job, Cheyne said, and averages about $250 an hour. Many homeowner's insurance policies cover this cost, because blood, bone fragments and other biological material pose a serious health hazard. There is also a limited amount of money available from the state Office of the Victim Advocate in cases that involve violent crime.
Cheyne said he can work with property owners and family members on payment, but his real challenge has been advertising.
"I'm still feeling out how I can contact people or not contact people," Cheyne said. "I don't want to be an ambulance chaser." Sensitive to the dynamics of grief, he remains reluctant to contact family members directly.
Police departments are largely unaware or reluctant to make referrals to private companies, Cheyne said. Referrals from funeral homes have been slow in coming, so he's turned to the Internet, watching the news for stories of violent crime or unattended death, then using his computer to track down the property owner and offer his services, the method that landed him the job in Winsted.
Housing authorities becoming are among his best customers, Cheyne said. "We have a lot of people getting older."
Cheyne's business can take an emotional toll. He uses stress relief techniques practiced by emergency responders, and he does woodworking to clear his mind of particularly disturbing scenes. The woodworking has proved a practical hobby, as sawdust can be used to absorb fluids.
The most difficult part of the job, Cheyne said, is not the walls splattered with blood, bone and brain matter after a gunshot, but the memorabilia and personal effects he sees in someone's home.
"To me that makes that person a person again ... the pieces of a life that make a life a life, the pictures we hang. You try to avoid seeing the story as much as possible. You don't want to drag around memories."
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