Gross Buster
Sunday, April 01, 2007
By JESSE LEAVENWORTH
Courant Staff Writer
Copyright © 2007 Hartford Courant
Sunday, April 01, 2007
By JESSE LEAVENWORTH
Courant Staff Writer
Copyright © 2007 Hartford Courant
It's A
Distasteful, Dangerous Job: CSD, Crime Scene Decontamination
Blood is sprayed on the apartment walls and flecked across the beige carpet. Bloody smears and handprints stain the hall and a child's bedroom door. Wide swaths of gore smudge an ivory-colored couch. The phone on a nearby end table is spattered with blood, and there's more around the corner in the master bedroom.
James Cheyne is on his hands and knees by the foot of the bed, focused on a scarlet drizzle on the light carpet. Encased in a light-blue hazmat suit, Cheyne sprays and scrubs the red circles with a sponge and rag, breaking up the tougher spots with the tip of a heavy screwdriver. The apartment is warm, and he's sweating.
``This is the stuff you don't see on `CSI,''' he says, his voice muffled by a respirator mask and face shield.
Two women survived a knife attack at this West Hartford apartment about three weeks ago. A suspect was arrested. The job, Cheyne says, is far from the worst he's seen. After only two years in business as Absolute TraumAway, he has pried chunks of human skull from drop ceilings and vacuumed maggots from floors soaked with rotting remains. He has cut up fetid carpets and scoured homes where garbage was piled head high. He has been called to stomach-turning accident scenes and homes where decomposing bodies were found only because of the odor, a stench so sickly sweet and horrible that, once smelled, Cheyne says, ``you can't un-smell it.''
Cheyne is part of a service industry that has spread rapidly across the nation in the past 15 years. Called bio-recovery, or crime and trauma scene decontamination, these businesses specialize in the safe cleaning of crime, suicide and accident scenes. Cheyne and other bio-recovery specialists also clear the colossal messes left by hoarders, mentally ill people who navigate canyons of stacked newspapers and other junk because they can't throw anything away.
Starting with only a handful of companies in the early 1990s, the bio-recovery industry has spread to more than 500 businesses across the country, including a handful in Connecticut. A professional organization, the American Bio-Recovery Association, offers training and certification. In this region, training is available at Crime & Death Scene Cleaning in Ipswich, Mass.
Experience varies widely among companies, and regulation is spotty, industry leaders say, but the most professional outfits adhere to federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards covering removal of blood-borne pathogens.
A Dangerous Job
Cheyne is standing outside the West Hartford apartment building on a warm March day, wrapping clear tape around the cuffs of his hazmat suit to seal seams between the suit and his rubber gloves. Blood, even old, dried blood, can carry diseases such as hepatitis C. The hazard, Cheyne says, cannot be underestimated.
He tells a story to illustrate his attitude. At a job he did before starting Southington-based TraumAway, a fellow worker accidentally cut her finger. She came toward Cheyne, laughing and taunting him with the bloody digit. Cheyne says he backed her off, saying he didn't know whether she had AIDS or some other deadly disease. The joke soured, and the woman angrily asked if he was calling her a tramp. No, Cheyne said, it's just that you don't mess with blood.
The danger of disease is a big reason why landlords, relatives and friends shouldn't try to mop up bloody scenes, Cheyne says. He's got a truck full of cleaning and sanitizing agents and a tracing liquid that identifies blood so he's not scrubbing coffee stains all day. He also has boxes stuffed with protective gear and gear designed to remove virtually every detectable trace of body fluids and odor. He even has power tools. At one job in Bristol, fluids from a decomposing body had leaked through the floorboards to the plaster ceiling below, and the entire section of floor and ceiling had to be cut away.
Cheyne charges about $250 an hour. His wife, Marilyn, helps at some jobs, and he knows people with backgrounds in hazmat removal he can call for the bigger jobs. In most cases, homeowners' insurance will cover the bulk of the bill, Cheyne says, and state assistance also is available to some tenants and homeowners. His costs include equipment, advertising and contracting with a disposal company that hauls away hazardous material to be incinerated.
Cheyne, 34, a Pennsylvania native now living in Southington, says he came to this work when several pieces of his past fell together. In the 1990s, he worked for an environmental cleanup business in Connecticut. He was studying to become an emergency medical technician several years ago when he read an article about crime and death scene cleanup. He already had a background in handling hazardous materials, but there was another piece of his background that pushed him to start his own business.
His mother, who has worked for a Pennsylvania county coroner for many years, had told him stories about people dealing with loved ones' suicides, murders and other horrible incidents. These people had to deal with a nasty question: Who's going to clean up the room where Dad shot himself?
He wouldn't be able to do it for one of his loved ones, Cheyne said.
``If something, God forbid, happened to my wife, I couldn't clean that,'' he said. ``It would destroy me.''
He's in it to make money, Cheyne says, but more important, to help people. The great satisfaction in this dirty, often tedious job, he says, is handing homes back to residents with no trace of violence or destitution.
``When I give this place back to this girl,'' he says of the West Hartford apartment, ``it's not a crime scene anymore. Everything's not blaring out at her. There's no bloodstains on her son's door.''
Not A Pretty Picture
Cheyne is sitting in a bookstore cafe, scrolling through photos of several jobs on a laptop computer. Here's one where a slab of marble fell on a worker in Milford and killed him. Here's another from a New Haven home showing puddles of human fluids pooled in an air mattress. Here's a hoarder's home in Guilford.
``This entire floor was covered with flies,'' he says.
Those jobs are especially disturbing, Cheyne says, because he realizes that people have been living in squalor, sometimes for years. He recalled pulling a pan full of unidentifiable goo from an oven in the Guilford home and placing it on a counter. The pan started to move. It was alive with maggots.
He scrolled to another photo, a Milford convenience store where employees had turned on robbers and beat one of them with a baseball bat. Blood had sprayed up to 25 feet away, and Cheyne had to remove several shelves of merchandise.
He starts cleaning crime scenes only after police finish their initial investigation. Removing some of the stuff investigators use, such as fingerprint powder, adds time to a job. He gets calls from people who find his business in the phone book, and he also does some direct advertising, sending notices to property owners after hearing news reports of crimes and other incidents.
He says he doesn't want to be an ambulance chaser, but he thinks the service that he and similar companies provide is important.
When he talks about his business, Cheyne keeps returning to the idea of revived trauma. People, he says, should not be confronted repeatedly with tangible evidence of a traumatic event.
A splotch of blood on the wall can evoke horrible memories.
``You shouldn't be victimized twice,'' he says. ``The healing process is delicate as it is.''
Cheyne says he isn't interested in how a crime or accident occurred, and, in fact, he tries not to absorb too many details of a victim's life through photos and other personal items left at a scene. It's better for his own mental health.
``My job,'' he says, ``is just to clean it to make it look like it didn't happen.''
Contact Jesse Leavenworth at jleavenworth@courant.com.
Blood is sprayed on the apartment walls and flecked across the beige carpet. Bloody smears and handprints stain the hall and a child's bedroom door. Wide swaths of gore smudge an ivory-colored couch. The phone on a nearby end table is spattered with blood, and there's more around the corner in the master bedroom.
James Cheyne is on his hands and knees by the foot of the bed, focused on a scarlet drizzle on the light carpet. Encased in a light-blue hazmat suit, Cheyne sprays and scrubs the red circles with a sponge and rag, breaking up the tougher spots with the tip of a heavy screwdriver. The apartment is warm, and he's sweating.
``This is the stuff you don't see on `CSI,''' he says, his voice muffled by a respirator mask and face shield.
Two women survived a knife attack at this West Hartford apartment about three weeks ago. A suspect was arrested. The job, Cheyne says, is far from the worst he's seen. After only two years in business as Absolute TraumAway, he has pried chunks of human skull from drop ceilings and vacuumed maggots from floors soaked with rotting remains. He has cut up fetid carpets and scoured homes where garbage was piled head high. He has been called to stomach-turning accident scenes and homes where decomposing bodies were found only because of the odor, a stench so sickly sweet and horrible that, once smelled, Cheyne says, ``you can't un-smell it.''
Cheyne is part of a service industry that has spread rapidly across the nation in the past 15 years. Called bio-recovery, or crime and trauma scene decontamination, these businesses specialize in the safe cleaning of crime, suicide and accident scenes. Cheyne and other bio-recovery specialists also clear the colossal messes left by hoarders, mentally ill people who navigate canyons of stacked newspapers and other junk because they can't throw anything away.
Starting with only a handful of companies in the early 1990s, the bio-recovery industry has spread to more than 500 businesses across the country, including a handful in Connecticut. A professional organization, the American Bio-Recovery Association, offers training and certification. In this region, training is available at Crime & Death Scene Cleaning in Ipswich, Mass.
Experience varies widely among companies, and regulation is spotty, industry leaders say, but the most professional outfits adhere to federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration standards covering removal of blood-borne pathogens.
A Dangerous Job
Cheyne is standing outside the West Hartford apartment building on a warm March day, wrapping clear tape around the cuffs of his hazmat suit to seal seams between the suit and his rubber gloves. Blood, even old, dried blood, can carry diseases such as hepatitis C. The hazard, Cheyne says, cannot be underestimated.
He tells a story to illustrate his attitude. At a job he did before starting Southington-based TraumAway, a fellow worker accidentally cut her finger. She came toward Cheyne, laughing and taunting him with the bloody digit. Cheyne says he backed her off, saying he didn't know whether she had AIDS or some other deadly disease. The joke soured, and the woman angrily asked if he was calling her a tramp. No, Cheyne said, it's just that you don't mess with blood.
The danger of disease is a big reason why landlords, relatives and friends shouldn't try to mop up bloody scenes, Cheyne says. He's got a truck full of cleaning and sanitizing agents and a tracing liquid that identifies blood so he's not scrubbing coffee stains all day. He also has boxes stuffed with protective gear and gear designed to remove virtually every detectable trace of body fluids and odor. He even has power tools. At one job in Bristol, fluids from a decomposing body had leaked through the floorboards to the plaster ceiling below, and the entire section of floor and ceiling had to be cut away.
Cheyne charges about $250 an hour. His wife, Marilyn, helps at some jobs, and he knows people with backgrounds in hazmat removal he can call for the bigger jobs. In most cases, homeowners' insurance will cover the bulk of the bill, Cheyne says, and state assistance also is available to some tenants and homeowners. His costs include equipment, advertising and contracting with a disposal company that hauls away hazardous material to be incinerated.
Cheyne, 34, a Pennsylvania native now living in Southington, says he came to this work when several pieces of his past fell together. In the 1990s, he worked for an environmental cleanup business in Connecticut. He was studying to become an emergency medical technician several years ago when he read an article about crime and death scene cleanup. He already had a background in handling hazardous materials, but there was another piece of his background that pushed him to start his own business.
His mother, who has worked for a Pennsylvania county coroner for many years, had told him stories about people dealing with loved ones' suicides, murders and other horrible incidents. These people had to deal with a nasty question: Who's going to clean up the room where Dad shot himself?
He wouldn't be able to do it for one of his loved ones, Cheyne said.
``If something, God forbid, happened to my wife, I couldn't clean that,'' he said. ``It would destroy me.''
He's in it to make money, Cheyne says, but more important, to help people. The great satisfaction in this dirty, often tedious job, he says, is handing homes back to residents with no trace of violence or destitution.
``When I give this place back to this girl,'' he says of the West Hartford apartment, ``it's not a crime scene anymore. Everything's not blaring out at her. There's no bloodstains on her son's door.''
Not A Pretty Picture
Cheyne is sitting in a bookstore cafe, scrolling through photos of several jobs on a laptop computer. Here's one where a slab of marble fell on a worker in Milford and killed him. Here's another from a New Haven home showing puddles of human fluids pooled in an air mattress. Here's a hoarder's home in Guilford.
``This entire floor was covered with flies,'' he says.
Those jobs are especially disturbing, Cheyne says, because he realizes that people have been living in squalor, sometimes for years. He recalled pulling a pan full of unidentifiable goo from an oven in the Guilford home and placing it on a counter. The pan started to move. It was alive with maggots.
He scrolled to another photo, a Milford convenience store where employees had turned on robbers and beat one of them with a baseball bat. Blood had sprayed up to 25 feet away, and Cheyne had to remove several shelves of merchandise.
He starts cleaning crime scenes only after police finish their initial investigation. Removing some of the stuff investigators use, such as fingerprint powder, adds time to a job. He gets calls from people who find his business in the phone book, and he also does some direct advertising, sending notices to property owners after hearing news reports of crimes and other incidents.
He says he doesn't want to be an ambulance chaser, but he thinks the service that he and similar companies provide is important.
When he talks about his business, Cheyne keeps returning to the idea of revived trauma. People, he says, should not be confronted repeatedly with tangible evidence of a traumatic event.
A splotch of blood on the wall can evoke horrible memories.
``You shouldn't be victimized twice,'' he says. ``The healing process is delicate as it is.''
Cheyne says he isn't interested in how a crime or accident occurred, and, in fact, he tries not to absorb too many details of a victim's life through photos and other personal items left at a scene. It's better for his own mental health.
``My job,'' he says, ``is just to clean it to make it look like it didn't happen.''
Contact Jesse Leavenworth at jleavenworth@courant.com.
