The year was 2009 and I had recently finished all training that I thought I would need to start a successful small business in crime scene cleanup. I bought all equipment that I thought that I would need and was just in a state of waiting for someone to die in a tragic manner. It seems terrible, I know, but when your in the business of death, death is what you depend on. After waiting some time without a single job, a call finally came in! It was a suicide that occurred at a nearby apartment complex in Indiana. Suicides are simple, I thought. This is the type of job I have been training for and our companies bread and butter. This job would set the tone for a lot of strange conversations that I would have similarly over and over again. I gathered all my supplies I thought I would need and set out for the apartment complex.

When I arrived at the apartment complex, I was immediately greeted by the manager who began to try to explain what had exactly taken place. As she was explaining this, I remembered seeing this particular incident on the news that morning. Long story short, SWAT was attempting to arrest a man wanted on sex crimes. According to the news and the apartment manager, this man threatened the police with a handgun forcing them to teargas the apartment. A “few canisters” were fired into the apartment, when they got no response from the man, they sent in a robot and found the man deceased from a single gunshot wound to the head in a back bedroom. Tear gas was really something that I had not thought about when it came to cleaning blood, but with a respirator on, how bad could it be, I thought. Once all information was gathered, I headed towards the apartment to begin the cleaning process.

I placed on my full bio Tyvek suit and respirator. I taped around my wrists where the sleeves met the gloves. I pulls my hood over my head in an attempt to hide every inch of skin from possible bio contamination. The last thing I wanted to do was get some sort of exposure. I was air tight and ready to GO! Instantly I realized that this was going to be a long day. It was July and hot as hell outside. I guess whatever SWAT did to this apartment made the power not be able to come back on and there was no air conditioning inside. I entered the apartment and made my way back to the bedroom. I had butterflies in my belly, I was going to clean my first suicide. It was EXCITING!! Looking around the bedroom, looking for blood and spatter, I was shocked that I could not locate anything. It wasn’t because it was not bloody, more because this apartment looked like someone had poured syrup all over the carpet throughout the apartment, then had the worse shedding dogs ever live there for a few years. This apartment was disgusting. It was my first encounter with someone who lived nastier than they died. A common theme in my line of work. After a few chemicals and following a trail of supplies left by EMS, I was able to located the two foot circle of blood and tissue from this suicide. I also located a small bit of spatter on a dresser and on a mattress. This seemed to be a simple starter job for me.

As I began to carry the supplies needed for this job back to the bedroom, I felt more and more sweat pooling in my suit. This suit was air tight, at least in the fact that it got very little circulation from the air outside, but it had enough to allow a little of the tear gas powder which seemed to be stirred up by the fans I had placed in the hallway to attempt to give me a little comfort. I did not really pay attention to the fogginess of the teargas at first because the full face respirator I was using kept it from burning my eyes. For anyone that doesn’t know how teargas works, it irritates the mucous membranes of the eyes, nose, mouth and lungs. I was good in this regards because of my respirator, but it also causes skin irritation to areas that are excessively sweating. You can only imagine areas that are excessively sweating in Tyvek suit that is not porous. I was on FIRE! But this wasn’t going to change, I had to push through with the cleanup.

As I was about to enter my carpet knife in an attempt to remove the contaminated portion of the carpet so that this portion could be disposed of as bio waste, when the apartment manager walked in. She looked at me like I was an alien, then quickly realized why I did. She motioned for me to come in the hallway and speak to her. Once in the hallway, the manager asked for a shocking request. “Can you just cut the bloody piece out so we can just patch the carpet up”, she asked. I guess that doesn’t seem too crazy, but the fact that the entire carpet was probably just as hazardous as the bloody carpet was unusual. Her intent was to not have to lay new carpet because the girlfriend of the deceased who was in jail would need to live there when she got out. She also requested that I just cut the small contaminated pieces off the mattress so the lady would have a bed to sleep on. She didn’t seem as concerned about the mattress though, because in her words, “People leave mattresses behind in these apartments when they move all the time, we can just get one of those if we need to”. Strange…. But she is the customer and the customer is always right. I agreed on these terms and entered the apartment to finish the job.

Back to the burning and back to the cutting of carpet. I removed the small portion of the carpet, then the padding. Luckily it wasn’t a lot of blood, so it never reached the sub floor in this case. I sprayed some sealer on the subfloor just in case. I wiped down the dresser and removed all contaminated pieces of the mattresses. As I searched the area for more blood contaminates I realized why the burning was so bad. The news reported that SWAT fired a few canisters of tear gas into the apartment, however, I located 9 canisters of tear gas scattered throughout the apartment. Every room with a raked out window had at least one canister in it. Yay for teargas.

I bagged all bio waste, removed all my tools and decontaminated myself and my equipment. I guess I was happy with my first job as a crime scene cleaner, but this job did not compare to the jobs I would encounter in the years to come. This job seemed too simple, in the future I would have to pull out all the stops and use all my skills to be successful and assist families in more ways that than the cleanup. I was satisfied with my first job, although it was small, I learned a lot and was excited for the future.