By Hugh Biggar
Life can indeed be nasty, brutish and short. Just ask Crime Scene Cleaners Inc., a company whose business is taking care of life's messes. In blood-red letters, its pick-up trucks advertise its services accidental death, homicides, suicides call 1.800.357.6731.
"People are animals," Neal Smither, founder and president of the private company, says.
He should know. Since 1996, Crime Scene Cleaners has thrived on cleaning up crime scenes, suicides, houses filled with waste and the occasional whale.
"We're not gore-mongers, it's a work proposition," Smither says of the business. "But we don't turn anything down, unless it's off the chart severity."
"You can't put a price on that service," says John Hirokawa, a captain with the Santa Clara County sheriffs' office.
Chris Mendoza, a Crime Scene Cleaners employee in Santa Clara County, also stresses the service side of the work.
"People tell me, if it weren't for you, I don't know what we would do," he says.
Smither, 38, founded Crime Scene Cleaners in 1996 after renting the movie Pulp Fiction. At that point in his life, he had dropped out of Soquel High School to surf, then drifted from the Navy to selling bonds. He was living in San Francisco and considering mortuary school when Pulp Fiction changed his life.
"It was an epiphany," he says of a scene where two gangsters call in a professional known as The Wolf to help clean a bloody car. "I thought to myself, that's a great idea."
Smither placed classified ads in newspapers and created fliers to distribute to Bay Area police stations. After a month, Smither got his first call from the sister of a cancer patient who committed suicide in Marin County.
"I didn't know if I could do it," Smither says now. "I didn't know what to expect or what to charge." Smither bought basic cleaning supplies at a drugstore and arrived with little more than a strong stomach and a willingness to try.
"I remember thinking, this isn't so bad, and it went quickly," he says. He made $175 in an hour and thought, "I'm onto something."
Smither's first wife divorced him because she was embarrassed by the work. He later married his banker. But Crime Scene Cleaners has since boomed by providing a service traditionally performed by police officers, police mechanics and family and friends. Due to blood-borne pathogens such as hepatitis C found at crime scenes, the business has also been federally regulated since 1998.
Headquartered in Orinda, Crime Scene Cleaners now has 18 offices throughout the United States; the Bay Area, and especially Santa Clara County, provides most of its local business.
"We routinely call them out," said Lt. John Carr, head of the San Jose traffic investigations unit. "Those folks are out there, scrubbing on their hands and knees. They leave nothing."
Carr said the department used Crime Scene Cleaners in Almaden Valley to clean up after a fatal traffic accident last October.
"We've used the service for quite awhile, ever since AIDS and air-borne pathogens became an issue," Hirokawa says. "It's a safety issue. We used to wash the cars ourselves with rags, hoses and hand sprayers," he says of vomit and other bodily fluids from passengers. These sorts of accidents are not uncommon in police cars (and why the cars have no carpeting). "We would flush it into the drains or put stuff in the garbage, but you can't do that now."
Given the safety concerns and regulations, Crime Scene Cleaners employees receive six months of intensive training in biohazards prior to employment. On the job, they don masks and white suits that cover them from head to toe. Perched on ladders or crouched down on all fours, they scrub with an enzyme that breaks down proteins and sanitizes.
Police officers have traditionally done their own cleaning, but because of greater understanding about blood pathogens, the San Jose police department has given over many of its cleaning duties to Crime Scene Cleaners.
"In the old days, we would take a hose and wash it down the drain," said Sgt. Steve Gracie, supervisor of the crime scene unit. "Attitudes have changed. We didn't think of blood as a biohazard. Now, people treat it differently. It could be infected with disease."
Officers will always be exposed to bloodied and coughing members of the public, but Gracie said that being able to depend on Crime Scene Cleaners to clean up public spaces and their offices, when it warrants, alleviates their job.
"It's better for the officer and for the community," he said. "Crime Scene Cleaners have been very good for us."
It's not always the gory things that get the cleaners out, but definitely the messy ones.
"We used them in our office a few weeks ago, when there was an elderly witness who was inebriated and urinated in the chair," Gracie said.
In addition to cleaning police cars, Crime Scene Cleaners' work includes cleaning up after gang disputes, cleaning waste-filled houses and cleaning motel rooms used by methamphetamine users.
This is especially true when the unusual comes calling. A few years ago Crime Scene Cleaners got a call from officials in Fremont after a dead whale washed up in a flood channel and got stuck. Workers from Crime Scene Cleaners used construction excavation equipment to remove it and buried the whale in a 300-foot pit nearby.
Such situations are typical of the fast thinking the work requires. "I'm improvising all the time," Smither says during an interview in between fielding calls.
One is from a motel employee in Georgia.
"Where is the manager?" Smither barks. "Get him on the phone."
There is a call from one of his employees on a job in Idaho.
"That's going to take three dumpsters, Max," he advises. "Go look at the dumpsters behind a grocery store and find a number to call."
And there is even a call from the local cops. On this morning, the Orinda police need some help with blood found on stairs.
Mendoza, 23, the cleaner largely responsible for Santa Clara County, also constantly improvises and is on call 24 hours a day from Friday through Tuesday.
His workday can include handling corpses to taking apart a room where a crime took place, removing anything--tiling, sinks, mirrors--that could remind someone of an unfortunate incident.
His biggest dislike is the creepy crawlies. "The worst thing for me is the scabies," Mendoza says. "You find them in the squad cars from people's clothes and stuff," he says of the little bugs he finds so disgusting.
"This job teaches you a lot about life," he says.
In addition to the dirty work of cleaning and hauling (waste is either taken to an incinerator in the East Bay or encapsulated in foam and taken to a dump), cleaners also must be able to handle grieving family members and to negotiate prices.
"You can't be a [weak-minded] in this job," Smither says. Most employees generally last about eight months, he says. "You have to be able to go in, assess the scene, use sensitivity and negotiate."
Mendoza, who previously sold electronics at the Santana Row Best Buy, hopes to be an exception to the eight-month standard.
"This is something you can really grow with because most people can't do it," he says. On days he is not working he even volunteers to help clean the morgue as a favor to his friends there. "It isn't disgusting and doesn't bother me at all," he says, "although I do sometimes get nightmares."
Regardless of the assignment, in the Bay Area the work is completed quickly and thoroughly. Both Smither and Mendoza pride themselves on this point.
"Same day, always," Smither says.
In the Bay Area, which for Crime Scene Cleaners stretches from Watsonville to the Napa Valley, this translates into responding to a call within 60 minutes. Nationally, Crime Scene Cleaners responds to calls within 24 hours. It also helped with relief efforts in New Orleans.
"You have to always wear the proper stuff and can't be lazy and cheap shot it," Mendoza says. This includes wearing protective body suits and respirators if necessary, and ripping out floors if needed to clean beneath crime scenes--particularly important for getting rid of odors.
"Once we are done, people are not going to see anything," he says. "People say thanks ... and I hope we never meet again."
Staff writer Michele Leung contributed to this article.
Copyright © Knight Ridder
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