Crime scene cleaners tackle aftermath with compassion

Content advisory: This article discusses sensitive topics, including suicide. Reader discretion is advised.

No one told Kristine Cecava that one day her job would lead her to cleaning up the scene of a suicide. Yet when the time came, she knew what needed to be done to help support the deceased's family.

Cecava, a former district judge and county attorney in Cheyenne County, was called to a crime scene at the home of a friend's son where he committed suicide. In sparsely populated areas, part of a county attorney's duties entails serving as a county coroner. However, after the body had been removed, the job of cleaning the scene remained.

It's a situation most people can't imagine being left with and it's often beyond what most people prepare for. But when the unimaginable occurs, what happens?

"This was beyond what normal people can do," Cecava said. "These people were left with all of this grief in their house and it took a lot to get the surfaces that had been hit and soaked in."

When the suicide occurred, Cecava said her friend's son was sitting on the edge of a waterbed.

"It happened to be done like most of the suicides that I saw which is a gun to the head," Cecava said. She is now retired.

The mortuary personnel helped clean up most of the visible surfaces and removed the body. While there were no pools of blood left, there were obvious stains. Knowing the parents would return soon, Cecava and a deputy county attorney decided to set up fans to clear the air and wash the bed sheets.

After trying to clean the sheets and while tucking them back in, Cecava said they found more remnants underneath the waterbed.

"That's when we decided we were way over our head," Cecava said.

After they did what they could, Cecava called a cleaning service from out of state as there weren't any local cleaning companies.

Adam Frerichs is accustomed to seeing the worst scenes. Frerichs is currently a sergeant with the Grand Island Police Department on the night shift. Prior to that, he worked as a detective for over two decades with the investigations division.

While he hasn't helped clean up after a suicide like Cecava has, he's been to many crime scenes, including suicides and homicides of people of all ages.

"They truly do vary from one situation to the next," Frerichs said. "Almost always you're going to be dealing with some degree of odor control or mitigating the foul stench."

As law enforcement officials, Frerichs said they don't advocate or advertise for private businesses, whether that's legal assistance, tow companies, funeral homes or cleanup companies. For death scene cleanups, Frerichs said they have provided family resource cards to help a family find local providers for the specific services.

For gunshot wounds, Frerichs said it typically requires cleaning and sanitization of the entire room.

"If there is a blood splatter type of scene from a high-velocity gunshot wound, there could be ceilings and multiple walls and surfaces and floors that are going to need to be cleaned and sanitized and likely painted over," Frerichs said.

The cleaning process can also depend on how long the body has been at the scene and the decomposition stages it passes.

Typically, Frerichs said bodies are found within 24 hours. Depending on the situation, bodies can be removed in another 24 hours with more delays for homicides versus natural deaths.

"Oftentimes, it's going to come down to a biological type situation of the amount of bacteria and such that are going to be present," Frerichs said.

During the decomposition process, Frerichs said fluids from a body on a bed will leak through the mattress and box spring, as well as through the floors and subfloors.

"As I was clearing the house, I ultimately got dripped on, and we didn't want to believe that drip from the ceiling in the basement was what it was, but unfortunately, that's exactly what it was," Frerichs said.

In those instances, a thorough cleaning would require removing the flooring and disinfecting some of the bracing under the floor rather than just covering the mess up. Failure to do so can cast off a putrefied smell casted off the fluids that have soaked through supportive beams in the floor.

Derek Myers, co-owner of Bio-One in Nebraska, often sees people on one of the worst days of their lives. Bio-One is a professional crime scene and biohazard decontamination cleaning service company with nearly 140 locations across the majority of the United States. Nebraska's Bio-One is located in Omaha but serves across the entire state.

"Generally speaking, we enter someone's home when there's something very sensitive that needs to be taken care of with discretion and compassion," Myers said.

In addition to Myers and his wife, Bio-One now has one full-time operation manager, two full-time technicians and two part-time technicians. The full-time employees are always on call and expected to pick up the phone whenever a call comes.

Each new employee undergoes about 90 days of probationary training with both internal and external training. The three months allow the employees to get a chance to see what the work is like on scene so they can make the decision if the job is right.

"There's an emotional component too that they need to get," Myers said. "You never know what you're going to, how you're going to react when handling the type of situations that we handle."

While located in eastern Nebraska, Bio-One travels anywhere in the state, including the rural towns in western Nebraska.

Half of the jobs that Bio-One tackles are schedulable jobs for biohazard cleanups, odor removals, hoarding removal and mold remediation. Biohazardous jobs require some specialized training to accomplish the task.

The other half of their jobs are the emergency services where, often, someone has passed away. These include undiscovered and decomposing deaths, suicides, blood spills and crime scenes. Before Myers and his team enter the scene, the coroner or medical examiner has often removed the bodily remains with the police.

"Unfortunately, there's still a lot of cleaning left to be done before the family can really come back into the home and either possibly sell the home and move on in that fashion or possibly reinhabit the home," Myers said.

Before getting into this job, Myers was a safety officer in the Air Force. During his service, he unfortunately saw a lot of soldiers die by suicide. Myers began to think about the difficult situations for families and questioned who they would call for the next steps.

As a business graduate from the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Myers and his wife knew they wanted to run their own business. While working a few other jobs, the thoughts from the military continued to stick in the back of his mind.

"It's a really needed service. It's very niche, but it's something that when you need it, you need it handled correctly," Myers said. "You need it handled the way that it should be, handled with compassion and the sensitivity that needs to be done."