Violent crimes happen every day; sometimes leaving behind a brutal mess.

Violent crimes happen every day; sometimes leaving behind a brutal mess.

When the investigation is over, whose job is it to clean it up?

It’s not your ordinary cleaning job, nor your average clients and not for the faint of heart.

80-year-old Walter Eastwood was beaten and robbed during a frightening home invasion earlier this month. Three men broke into Eastwood’s home, beat him, tied him up and stole thousands of dollars and jewelry from his safe. The attack left blood stains on the couch and floor as painful reminders of a brutal attack.

The criminals ran off leaving Eastwood and his wife emotionally scarred and their home a bloody mess. That's where crime scene cleaners come into play.

CBS47 talked with crime scene cleaner Paul Duvivier. Duvivier said, "Blood and body fluids contain lots and lots, over 250diff bacteria and viruses."

It's gruesome work but when a violent crime occurs and someone has to clean up the blood and body fluids the right way. "Somebody untrained, the guy with a mop bucket and bottle of bleach unfortunately that doesn't do it, Duvivier said.

In the Eastwood's case, the left over blood in the carpet may seem like small stains but what lies beneath is hazardous and can be a heath risk. “We will be removing a great deal of the carpet checking out underneath the carpet and treat the cement that's underneath that,” said Duvivier.

Duvivier sees himself as more than cleaning man; he's part of the healing process, helping families get thought emotionally hard times. Duvivier said, “They have gone through something that was tragic or horrendous for them and we want the help them."

It's a tough job. Duvivier works with families that have experienced suicides, murders, and violent accident scenes… it's more than most people can handle. Duvivier said, "What a horrendous situation where a family has to be the ones cleaning up a relative."

Duvivier and his team understand a family needs help that few can provide. It's more than just clean up; it's a shoulder to cry on, or setting up a place to stay while the painful memories are washed away.

After removing and disposing all the heartbreaking signs of the attack, the Eastwood family can finally feel comfortable going back into their home, even if memories of the attack remain.

Death rides a pale horse and these guys ride in a pale van, cleaning up after him.

By John Guenther

It's getting late on Michael Nicholson's driveway, when Nicholson's friend and employee Johnny Grant asks if he'd seen the show "1,000 Ways To Die." Nicholson responds that he doesn't watch TV. They're standing next to the Clean Scene Services van which is packed with cleaning equipment and bio-hazard containers.

The two are on call 24/7 and their job is to clean and disinfect the things other people aren't willing to, from mold to the aftereffects of a shotgun suicide.

When asked what it's like waiting for death night and day, Nicholson said he's more concerned with assisting the families left behind.

"Pretty much it's not that we're waiting for it to happen. It's happening all the time," said Nicholson. "It's just whether or not we'll be there to be able to help them."

A few nights earlier, inside the Clean Scene offices on Valley Boulevard, owner-operator Nicholson described each one of photos of past jobs hanging on the wall: train crashes, suicides and car accidents. News stories profiling Clean Scene with headlines like "The Death Squads" hang on another wall. Nicholson said the building used to be the clubhouse and meth lab of the Mongols motorcycle club.

Even though every job they do does not involve death, it seems it is always not too far away. The building space next to Clean Scene is taken up by an artist who fabricates couches out of caskets.

Nicholson got started in the industry while picking up bodies for the L.A. County Coroner's office which he did since he was 17. While doing pickups, people would ask him about who was going clean up once they were gone. Nicholson and his friends started coming back and providing cleaning services as a side job.

"It was rewarding as far as helping people," Nicholson said. "But if there was no money in it, we wouldn't have kept doing it, I'll tell you that."

After 14 years in business, he said he now charges a minimum of around $1,000 per job, depending on damage done and size of the cleanup area. But for labor-intensive jobs their services can cost between $4,000 and $6,000, especially for one of those shotgun jobs which can run well into the night. Nicholson describes the blast as similar to a bomb going off, with remains even landing two rooms away.

Grant said his salary is "kind of hourly," working as a trauma scene technician for Clean Scene. When asked about waiting for something terrible to happen, he agreed with Nicholson's assessment.

"Actually this is L.A.," Grant said. "There's like 20 million plus people here. There usually isn't a whole lot of waiting."

The Los Angeles County vital records office estimates that there were 53,794 deaths in the county in 2009, not including Long Beach or Pasadena. Around 42 percent of those occurred from dusk until dawn or 6PM to 5AM.

Nicholson said his business has an up-and-down cycle with more jobs coming in during the summer.

"Bodies decompose in the quicker in the summer in the heat, said Nicholson." More people are out. There's more action."

When asked about working nighttime jobs, he said there's a similar pattern.

"Sometimes, it'll be four times and we have a month where we don't go out at all at night."

The types of jobs that drag the Clean Scene crew out at night include train and car accidents which require their services in order to get the trains and traffic running again.

Grant said their job cleaning up after shootings can get a lot more interesting in certain parts of the city at night. "It depends on what happened down there and who's watching you clean up the mess," he added. "Sometimes it almost appears that the ones watching are the ones who committed the crime."

"There are a lot more nuts at night," Nicholson simply said.

"We've had calls that are just mundane but because it's at night, it's actually scary." said Carol Nicholson, wife of Michael and who started the business with him out of the back of their Toyota. "You're in places you don't know and with people you don't know."

Carol Nicholson is now the office manager for the company. Sitting in her office in their Agua Dulce home and surrounded by pictures of family and hazardous material cleanup manuals, she said they've talked about moving the service in other states and cities but decided against it.

"L.A.'s the place to be," she added. "The people here are one of a kind. At nighttime, the city comes alive and you see people that you ordinarily don't see especially in this type of work."

One nighttime job that seems to have gained a legendary status among the family is a suicide which took place in a sporting goods store. A homeless man came in to the store, asked to see a shotgun, loaded it with his own bullet and shot himself. The first Clean Scene crew on site had to work all night, call in reinforcements later on and hire a truck to haul the huge amount of damaged merchandise away.

"It was just spread out so bad and there was so much merchandise affected," said Michael Nicholson. "They had their loss prevention people there and deciding what level they wanted to do things. They actually opened [the store] before it was completed. They all do that."
The job even inspired an opening scene in the 2008 movie "Sunshine Cleaning" which featured a family that got into the same business. Michael Nicholson said it goes vice versa and Hollywood sometimes inspires real life in the industry.

"Every time a movie comes out, there's always a few new companies," he said. "'The Cleaner,' 'Sunshine Cleaning.' Any of those movies. But most of them are not very long-lasting."

When people ask about his job, Michael Nicholson said they often ask if it's like "CSI." He said TV shows usually get things mostly right since the shows tend to have crime scene advisers, something his company has done before. But, like most entertainment, it's a little off from reality. "To me it's just not real," he commented.

Carol Nicholson said the crime scene cleanup characters in movies are often portrayed negatively and are based on Michael. "It's not based on me," retorted Michael Nicholson.

"When you're watching it, you know they're talking about Michael and he's always portrayed as an asshole," said Carol Nicholson. "It never fails."

Michael Nicholson reconsidered a moment and said, "I must be an asshole," and laughed.

Because of the on call nature of the business, the Nicholsons have found that making personal plans is like tempting fate.

"When you're ready and willing, nothing will happen," said Michael Nicholson. "As soon as you start doing something and get occupied...that's when you'll get a call at night."

The calls can affect not only their outlook on life and death but their social lives as well.

"People think we're flaky because they'll invite us to parties or invite us somewhere and we can't make it because--guarantee it--that's when the phone rings," said Carol Nicholson.

Carol added that nighttime is when the prank calls come rolling in. She said they can tell most calls are bogus right off the bat. But she said she is fully expecting someone to force them onto a dry run call. "They'll give us an address...and when we show up, they'll be off in the corner laughing at us."

"I've had people call up and say 'I'm going to kill somebody,'" said Michael Nicholson. "'Can you come clean it?' Just stupid stuff really."

Despite the uneven schedule and pranksters, the Nicholsons and crewmembers recognize they have an opportunity to provide some aid to those going through a trying time.

"We found people that have been looking for days for someone to help them and then when they finally find us, they're very relieved," said Michael Nicholson.

He recounted how, on their second job ever, they were called in to clean the living room of a man who had committed suicide on a couch. His daughter could not make herself enter the house. It wasn't until the crew finished when the woman was comfortable enough to come in and sit in the living room. Carol Nicholson said they aren't necessarily leaving grieving clients happy, but at least ready to take care of what's next.

Grant said what happens to clients once the crews finish a job does go across his mind from time to time. But Grant mostly has a yeoman's attitude towards the rewards of the job.

"The reward is just getting the job done right and not having to go back and not having anybody complaining and not having people feel like they've been ripped off," said Grant.

When asked about passing on lessons to those without the stomach for the job, he became more practical than philosophical for a moment.

"Maybe how to clean stains once in awhile," he joked. "That could come in handy."

After completing a job at night, Michael Nicholson said he usually is just looking forward to getting something to eat. But he also has thought about how most people are unaware of a lot of what happens while they sleep.

"We'll be finishing up a job just as the sun is coming up and traffic starting to come back starting to come out for the morning and you think that they don't even know what happened prior to them getting out there this morning," he said.

Carol Nicholson said the whole experience of working the trauma scene beat has left her sometimes feeling apart from other moms at her children's school.

"I'm nothing like them because of what we deal with," she said. While talking about certain stores where their crews have worked, she has a distinctly different perspective from others. "All I can see is brains in sporting goods."

But she believes her children have ultimately benefited from the family business, and not just financially. She said all of their children have been very aware of that they do.

"Most kids think about death whenever a loved one dies and they go to a funeral and they have to be explained what is death," she said in a calm, matter-of-fact voice. "My kids grow up knowing that death is just there."

Their 20-year-old son has been working with them for a couple years and has joined one of the crews full-time. Michael Nicholson has found an additional benefit to the arrangement: He now has someone who can go out at night.

"He can't wait until his dad retires so he can take over," Carol Nicholson mentions. "The littlest one is eight and he can't wait to be at his dad's side in the Clean Scene van."

As I drove away from the Nicholsons' house and down a winding darkened road toward the lights of L.A., a small, furry rodent darted in front of my car, far too close for me to avoid it. The unfortunate meeting of car and animal reminded me of something Michael Nicholson said back at his office.

"Life's very valuable...precious and you never know what will happen. We've taught our kids that. There's no guarantees that you'll be here tomorrow. Nobody's promised tomorrow and a lot of people don't get it."

Companies tackle mess a corpse can leave behind

Published on October 1, 2009
Angie's List
by Staci Giordullo

What happens to those who die alone — and no one notices? Welcome to the business of biohazard remediation. Originally limited to crime and trauma scene cleaning, the industry's scope has grown to include decontamination of homes soiled by human waste, tissue and body fluids, and other toxins associated with a decomposing body.


Ronald Gospodarski, owner of Bio-Recovery Corp. in New York City, started his business in 1988 after spending years as a paramedic and realizing no company was offering these types of services.

"No one is prepared for this type of thing," he says. "I come in and solve the problem."

According to Gospodarski, approximately 75 percent of his business is cleaning up after decompositions.

"I get calls from family, police, landlords — a lot of times it's the property manager," he says.

Stacie Salerno of Bradford, Pa., recently hired Gospodarski to clean her brother's apartment after he was stabbed to death, reportedly by a stranger police believe he likely met online. "I never knew this kind of company even existed," Salerno says. "But they took care of everything. You never would know there was a murder in that apartment."

Like many other industries, the prerequisites to be a bio-recovery technician vary greatly by state. The federal Occupational Safety and Health Administration requires proper training in order to handle blood-borne pathogens. In addition, companies should hold the proper permits for biohazard waste disposal as well as general liability and pollution liability insurance.

What happens to those who die alone? Welcome to the business of biohazard remediation. See examples of biohazard remediation >>Dale Cillian, president of the American Bio-Recovery Association, says the lack of a nationwide standard is unnerving because there are companies that grossly overcharge customers and don't thoroughly clean or properly dispose of the waste.

"Some of these companies will rob people blind," Cillian says. "They're hurting families at the worst time of their lives." Gospodarski, who's certified with the ABRA, agrees and says his average job costs between $1,500 and $3,500. "Customers need to do their due diligence before hiring a company like mine," he says.

Industry experts recommend verifying companies with ABRA — which has 80 members — Angie's List and the BBB.

While a coroner typically removes the body before the biohazard remediation team arrives, there are a number of threats left behind — many of which go unnoticed by the untrained eye.

"We see marks of contamination affected during the removal of the body such as fluid from the body bag touching walls and furniture," says John DiGulio, co-founder of USA Decon in Houston. "Light switches and door handles are usually left unclean."

Hiring a professional to clean up such a mess can lift an emotional burden from grieving family members. "There aren't many jobs in which you can provide unimaginable relief for someone," DiGulio says.

Originally limited to crime and trauma scene cleaning, the scope of biohazard remediation has grown to include the cleanup and decontamination associated with mold, human waste, tissue and body fluids, animal waste and other toxins.

If a body is left undiscovered in a home for any period of time, a bio-recovery technician is needed to remove the unpleasant consequences of that decomposition.

Tenants offered way out of troubled building

OAKLAND, CA (KGO) -- The repairs are finished at an East Oakland apartment complex which was the scene of a long police standoff last week. It is the same building where two Oakland police officers were gunned down this spring.

The crime scene clean-up crews were back Thursday, trying to remove the lingering stench of tear gas.

As if the history of the building is not bad enough, the property is now in foreclosure. The bank that owns it says the cleanup is complete and that residents can return. But many do not want to.

The 74th Avenue and MacArthur Boulevard apartment building is the same place where Oakland SWAT team members Sergeant Ervin Romans and Sergeant Daniel Sakai were killed in a shootout with Lovell Mixon March 21, 2009. The shootout came after Mixon had killed Oakland Police Officer John Hege and Sergeant Mark Dunakin during a traffic stop earlier that day.

Just last week, police put the building on a 12-hour lockdown during a standoff with a shooting suspect who they say hid inside the apartment. Police ransacked units searching for the gunman. Residents were forced to move out.

"It's too many incidents," displaced tenant Bernard Hampton said. "That's the second shooting over there and there aint no telling what else might happen over there."
Tamalpais Bank says it will pay for a three week hotel stay so tenants can find other living arrangements. A bank spokesperson said, "Whether we get a reimbursement from the city or not...just morally speaking this is the right thing to do to get people back on their feet."

It turns out the city may not have to pick up the final tab for damages caused by the police raid or the inconvenience it caused tenants, who have been living in a hotel ever since.

A police department spokesman told ABC7, "In many instances...the city or county cannot be held liable for damage based on qualified immunity (public safety personnel lawfully performing their duties)."

Tenants like Tamesisha Marbray and her new born daughter feel stuck in the middle.
"It's a dark cloud over the building," Marbray said. "Two times is enough, the third time, bullets fly anywhere, go through wall, you know we're all in there, unsafe basically."

Tenants say they are unsafe in part because the man at the center of the standoff, accused of shooting another man around the corner, has been released from custody because the victim is refusing to cooperate with investigators.

The Final Scene

A Rancho Cucamonga company pioneers the science—and emotional art—of cleaning up a crime scene

By: Nate Jackson

On his hands and knees, clothed head-to-toe in biohazard gear, Chris King uses a white rag to mop up a puddle of viscous red/brown blood clots and pink spinal fluid from the floor of an Anaheim garage. It’s 9:30PM on a summer Sunday; the temperature is still only in the 70s. King is a native of Upland, a former restaurant server. Sweat forms rivulets from his scalp, drips off his clear protective face mask, onto the concrete floor, mingling with the muck and ooze, which harbors a stale perfume of iron and rotting fruit.

“You have to work in stages so you don’t miss anything,” says King, working in tight circles, tossing each sopping red rag into a biohazard waste bin. He rarely looks up at his clients, three mid-sized men standing sullenly amid the usual flotsam and jetsam of a California garage— clothing racks, a treadmill, two bicycles, yellow and pink, leaning against a book shelf. Tonight they have improbably lost a family member—a father of three young children who had fatally shot himself in the head several hours earlier.

For King and the crew at Crime Scene Steri-Clean, cleaning up the worst remnants of human nature is a way of life. But after 15 years in business, these pioneers of the private crime scene/ biohazard disposal industry believe that their ability to handle both the physical mess and emotional wreckage of everyday tragedy is what continues to keep them unique—and in business.

“Who’s gonna clean this?”
“That’s the hardest part, having to see [clients] going through such a painful situation,” whispers King behind the company van after offering a second round of condolences to the men inspecting his work. Next to body decompositions, suicide clean ups are the most common. Three years after finding the job on a Craigslist posting, King can still remember the details of every clean up he’s ever done; suicides, murders, rat-infested houses.

Founded in 1995 by husband and wife Cory and Tammy Chalmers, Rancho Cucamonga-based CSSC is probably one of the last businesses you would think even existed. That is, until you need them.

Servicing over 30 cities including most of the Inland Empire, L.A., Orange County and parts of Northern California, the 24-hour clean up crew handles everything from blood and brain matter, to body decompositions and cluttered houses that would send an ordinary maid service screaming for the hills.

As CEO of the company, Chalmers and his wife, the company’s CFO, have laid enough ground work with surrounding CHP, fire department and law enforcement agencies to ensure that they’re never short on calls. At this point, getting woken up by a call of a car accident, a shooting or a stabbing is nothing new.

Besides doing his part to run the company, Chalmers is also a firefighter for the city of Garden Grove. But it was what he saw before that—during his days as a paramedic, running in and out of grisly scenes and leaving families to clean up the mess—that inspired him to start a side business.

“I would see the family all distraught and crying and emotional,” he recalls. “And I wondered: Who’s gonna clean this?”

One haunting scene finally inspired him to go home to his wife and propose the idea of a crime scene clean up company. He had walked into a bathroom where a man with hemophilia had committed suicide with a shot gun.

“You couldn’t see any of the tile floor,” says Chalmers, who remembers standing in front of a lake of red and violence splattered on the walls. The sound of the man’s wife screaming hysterically in front of the house added to the horror. He knew once the police and paramedics left with the body, she would be left to clean the bathroom.

A decade and a half later, CSSC finds itself in an industry bordering on over-saturation in California. They are now one of 315 crime scene clean up companies in the state.

“There’s not enough business to go around,’ says Cory Chalmers, adding that many of these newly-licensed companies tend to cycle out of business in six months because the inability to snag consistent work.

“It’s not like you can just advertise in the yellow pages and people will call you,” he says. “Who thinks when their mom kills herself to grab the yellow pages? Nobody.”

So how does CSSC continue thriving in the midst of so many fly-by-night companies? Several years ago, Tammy Chalmers took a step that changed the face of the company from blood scrubbing vendor to viable resource.

Using her expertise in the field of bloodborne pathogens and hoarders (or pack rats), Tammy Chalmers teaches free classes to law enforcement and firefighters on how to effectively protect themselves against blood-transmitted diseases like hepatitis and other biohazard on behalf of CSSC. Though the classes aren’t for profit, it’s a marketing strategy that gives their name and number to agencies that require their services. These days, her skills are put to the test daily as she trains classes all over California. Currently the company carries three major services: crime scene clean up, hoarder clean up and the Home Again Foundation, which provides government-funded assistance to those in need of the company’s services.

“All of us as a team do amazing work and you leave the job exhausted most of the time, not just some of the time,” says the upbeat, blonde-haired former wedding coordinator. There was a time early on in the business where she found herself plucking skull fragments out of walls as she cleaned crime scenes side by side with her husband. She calls them “the old knee pad and scrub brush days.”

Staring down death
Besides being on call 24 hours a day, it’s an employee’s ability to deal with distraught clients on a daily basis that determines how they will fair in the company. The ability to deal with people at the worst time in their lives is a mission that never gets easier.

Despite, or maybe because of the gruesome nature of their business, CSSC has no shortage of media interest in what they do. The company has been the subject of several TV pilots and magazine articles. Even Samuel L. Jackson came down for a training session to prepare for a movie role in the 2008 film Cleaner. On a daily basis, Chalmers fields emails and phone calls from people who want a job, chasing gory TV fantasies.

“It’s not glamorous, not CSI,” says Tammy Chalmers. “It’s hard, back-breaking, emotional, difficult—everything you could possibly say about a job.”

For workers like King, who’ve spent countless nights erasing blood and bad memories for clients, the job has taught lessons that sometimes only a stare down with death can provide.

“When you’re cleaning up a 19-year-old kid who just got hit by a car, it makes you realize that you don’t have a predetermined amount of time. So it’s within our best interest as human beings to kind of embrace every single minute as if it is going to be the last one and that’s what I try to live by everyday and just be a very pleasant, happy person.”

Crime Scene Leftovers Pose Problem For Sanitation

Call it the Case of the Bloody Mattress.

City sanitation workers in southwestern Kentucky were recently left with the problem of how to dispose of a bloody mattress put out with the trash.

The mattress came from a home where police say a 37-year-old man appears to have died from self-inflicted stab wounds. The problem came when trash collectors realized they couldn't pick up a potential biohazard, but didn't want to leave it by the side of the road in a residential neighborhood in Hopkinsville.

"This was an area of concern for us because blood is considered a biohazard and not only can our trash trucks not pick it up, but it could be dangerous for people in the community," said George Hampton, a route supervisor for Hopkinsville Solid Waste Authority.

The Kentucky New Era reports that the mattress disappeared by midweek, but sanitation officials didn't take it and were still trying to make sure it was properly disposed of. The location of the mattress remained a mystery at week's end.

Hopkinsville sanitation workers received an anonymous call reporting a mattress, possibly covered in blood, that had been set on a curb outside of a home. That was the concern of the anonymous caller, Hampton said, who said children in the neighborhood could start to play on the mattress and come into contact with the dried blood that might have diseases.

Because there was blood on the mattress, sanitation workers couldn't haul it off with the rest of the trash.

"It raises a question for us about where we take it from here," Hampton said. "Someone has to clean up messes like these and we can't do it."

Solid Waste Superintendent Bill Bailey said sanitation workers aren't allowed to pick up possible biohazards, including blood, from the side of the road. Instead, Bailey said, the department needs to call other landfills to see who will pick up and take the items.

"Sometimes we can process and wrap it in plastic and dispose of it that way. But other times we have to contact a company that deals with disposing of medical waste."

Charlotte Write, a spokeswoman for Stericycle, a national company that specializes in medical waste disposal, said medical waste is generally burned to kill pathogens that can live in dried blood.

"It is important to dispose of all medical waste, especially waste that comes from the body, so as not to spread diseases," Write said.

Hopkinsville Police Chief Guy Howie said the families must clean up the scene of a murder or suicide or pay to have it done.

"It doesn't sound very friendly, I know, but that's just how it has to be handled," Howie said. "Someone has to clean it up and someone has to dispose of all of this, it's just a matter of figuring out who. It's amazing that just one mattress on a curb can raise so many questions."

Someone solved sanitation's problem by taking the mattress from in front of the home. Bailey said sanitation workers didn't remove it, but finding out what became of the mattress is important. It had to be properly sterilized and disposed of.

"We can't just stick it in our landfill and be done with it," Bailey said. "Whether it's on that curb or not, it's still hazardous material."