It would be safe to assume that the man in 6-F did not have many friends or relatives, or at least none who called or visited regularly. No one, not even his neighbors, noticed his absence for a number of weeks. That is, not until a putrid odor began filling the hallways of the Queensbridge Houses in Long Island City.
Consuelo Sanchez, 55, whose apartment is adjacent to 6-F, complained about the smell for weeks before housing authority officials unlocked the door to discover the decomposed body on a sofa, the television still burbling away. The occupant, an 86-year-old retired transit worker, had died a month earlier of natural causes. "I kept telling them, 'The man is dead,' " Ms. Sanchez said. "I was hoping I wasn't right."
The medical examiner removed the bulk of the remains, but it was up to Ronald Gospodarski to take care of the rest, most of them viscous and indescribably malodorous. The man in 6-F had largely soaked into the sofa cushions as his body decayed, and his gastric acid had melted through the plastic covering on the upholstery.
"I don't care if you're black, white, rich or poor, whether you live in the projects or a penthouse, everyone smells the same when they die," Mr. Gospodarski said as he scraped a caramel-colored goo off the floor of Apartment 6-F this spring.
Mr. Gospodarski, a paramedic for 23 years, is what is known as a bio-recovery technician, a highly trained, extremely efficient, self-employed house-cleaner of sorts whose specialty is removing the unpleasant aftereffects of suicides, attempted suicides, shotgun murders, accidental impalements and, in the case of lonely, unnoticed passings like that of the man in 6-F, "decomps."
In a city like New York, Mr. Gospodarski and his six employees are rarely idle. In recent months, they have mopped up a mailroom clerk who jumped from the 38th floor of an office building, sterilized a piece of filtration equipment that took the life of a water company employee and cleaned up after a boyfriend put a bullet through the head of a Staten Island mother as she made shrimp gumbo in her kitchen.
His company, Bio-Recovery Corporation, is the only business based in New York that specializes in such matters. There are a couple of similar cleanup companies with offices outside New York, but Bio-Recovery dominates the business in the city, mainly through word of mouth. It operates from a building that sits across the street from a cemetery in Queens.
"Everyone is dying to see us," said Mr. Gospodarski, 43, a jovial, talkative man who requires little prompting to recount some of his more memorable jobs, all of which he records in photographs that he keeps on his computer to show to visitors.
It was Mr. Gospodarski who dealt with the mayhem of the Wendy's restaurant massacre in 2000 that left five people dead in Queens and the triple murder that took place a year later above the Carnegie Deli in Manhattan. Bio-Recovery also tackled the anthrax contamination of The New York Post and ABC News and the sterilization of the Regal Princess, a cruise ship whose passengers were sickened by the Norwalk virus in 2003.
But the meat-and-potatoes of Mr. Gospodarski's business is unheralded deaths, like that of a troubled teenager who shot himself in the basement of his parents' Richmond Hill home in September or the quiet demise of elderly New Yorkers.
In the case of the man in 6-F, his extended period of decay fouled every item in his apartment, requiring that everything, even sections of the floor, be removed and discarded.
"I've had guys left dead for months, where fluid seeped down six floors and everything had to be torn out," Mr. Gospodarski said. "You can't leave one drop of blood or body fluid or the place will stink." In most cases, he said, post-mortem cleanup is quick and simple - wiping down blood-splattered walls, ripping out soiled carpet - but it is a job that would undoubtedly prove burdensome to grieving relatives.
"Most of the time we're simply providing psychological comfort," Mr. Gospodarski said. "People who commit suicide don't think about what they're going to leave behind."
Bio-Recovery's services start at $600 for cases of minimal decomposition and reach into the thousands for more extensive mayhem. The company generally uses industrial-strength cleanser, but its newest service involves superheating an entire apartment, which kills odor-producing microbes and eliminates the need to throw every last painting, book and piece of electronic equipment in the trash. The minimum cost for that procedure is $3,000.
The New York State Crime Victims Board will pay up to $2,500 for cleaning up after a homicide, and many car insurance policies cover the price of restoring the interior of vehicles whose passengers wind up on the wrong end of a gun. Mr. Gospodarski said he never turns anyone away, even if the client cannot pay.
"We never leave anyone hanging," he said without apparent irony. Nearly all of his jobs come from referrals from police officers, prosecutors and paramedics. He does not, he said, call grieving families whose loss he gleans from newspaper accounts.
Bio-Recovery started in Mr. Gospodarski's apartment in 1998. After his years as a paramedic, Mr. Gospodarski said, he was bothered by what he saw on the job.
Ambulance crews would take away a body and leave behind a disturbing pile of latex gloves, syringes and blood-soaked gauze. The detectives who often followed would ring the scene with yellow police tape and spray fingerprint dust around every light switch and door knob.
"I've seen the medical examiner leave behind pieces of brain," he said. "Grieving families shouldn't have to deal with that."
Mr. Gospodarski and his crew are alternately philosophical and vulgar, cracking jokes about the gore in their midst, or about the housekeeping habits of the deceased.
Last week, as they cleaned up the blood of Chantel Curtis, the Staten Island woman who was shot by a boyfriend who then killed himself, Mr. Gospodarski could not help noticing the details of her life: the treadmill in the living room, the vase of roses on the table and the joyful clutter of children's toys. "Why can't these people just kill themselves and leave everyone else alone?" he asked, his eyes pausing on a photograph of the victim and her young son.
It comes as some relief to Bio-Recovery's workers that many cleanups are limited to tiled bathrooms. A fair number of suicides are carried out in bathtubs, and many elderly people, beset by illness, will retreat to a bathroom to die, often on the toilet, the workers said.
Manny Sosa, like many employees, said he had become inured to death. He once retched during a cleanup that required him to handle entrails, but by now he can eat lunch on the job. "Sometimes we play detective and try to figure out what happened," said Mr. Sosa, 26. "I actually look forward to coming to work."
While they may be accustomed to gore, even the hardiest among the crew were unnerved by a recent job that required them to clean out a house in the Bronx that had been used for Santeria, the South American and Caribbean religion that involves the ritual slaughter of animals. The practitioners had defaulted on their mortgage, leaving the bank to deal with whatever mysteries lurked in the dank basement. Mr. Gospodarski's workers, dressed in biohazard suits, sifted through soil and discovered animal hoofs, desiccated snakes, razor blades and bottles of liquid marked with the international symbol for poison. The workers, most of them from Latin America and the West Indies, were clearly scared. At one point, Mr. Sosa unearthed what appeared to be a clump of human hair, and the crew's collective shudder was palpable. "I don't like this one bit," Mr. Sosa said. "I'd rather be dealing with a gunshot victim."
The summer months were unusually slow, and Mr. Gospodarski said he was looking forward to winter, when violence tends to move indoors. Bloodshed is more common in the summer, but there is little money to be made from gunplay that stains the pavement. With winter, however, people end up packed into tiny apartments. Throw boredom, drugs and weapons into the mix, and you have the potential makings for a bio-recovery bonanza.
"When cabin fever sets in, we get a lot of calls," he said. "All you can do is hope for a heavy snowstorm."
Consuelo Sanchez, 55, whose apartment is adjacent to 6-F, complained about the smell for weeks before housing authority officials unlocked the door to discover the decomposed body on a sofa, the television still burbling away. The occupant, an 86-year-old retired transit worker, had died a month earlier of natural causes. "I kept telling them, 'The man is dead,' " Ms. Sanchez said. "I was hoping I wasn't right."
The medical examiner removed the bulk of the remains, but it was up to Ronald Gospodarski to take care of the rest, most of them viscous and indescribably malodorous. The man in 6-F had largely soaked into the sofa cushions as his body decayed, and his gastric acid had melted through the plastic covering on the upholstery.
"I don't care if you're black, white, rich or poor, whether you live in the projects or a penthouse, everyone smells the same when they die," Mr. Gospodarski said as he scraped a caramel-colored goo off the floor of Apartment 6-F this spring.
Mr. Gospodarski, a paramedic for 23 years, is what is known as a bio-recovery technician, a highly trained, extremely efficient, self-employed house-cleaner of sorts whose specialty is removing the unpleasant aftereffects of suicides, attempted suicides, shotgun murders, accidental impalements and, in the case of lonely, unnoticed passings like that of the man in 6-F, "decomps."
In a city like New York, Mr. Gospodarski and his six employees are rarely idle. In recent months, they have mopped up a mailroom clerk who jumped from the 38th floor of an office building, sterilized a piece of filtration equipment that took the life of a water company employee and cleaned up after a boyfriend put a bullet through the head of a Staten Island mother as she made shrimp gumbo in her kitchen.
His company, Bio-Recovery Corporation, is the only business based in New York that specializes in such matters. There are a couple of similar cleanup companies with offices outside New York, but Bio-Recovery dominates the business in the city, mainly through word of mouth. It operates from a building that sits across the street from a cemetery in Queens.
"Everyone is dying to see us," said Mr. Gospodarski, 43, a jovial, talkative man who requires little prompting to recount some of his more memorable jobs, all of which he records in photographs that he keeps on his computer to show to visitors.
It was Mr. Gospodarski who dealt with the mayhem of the Wendy's restaurant massacre in 2000 that left five people dead in Queens and the triple murder that took place a year later above the Carnegie Deli in Manhattan. Bio-Recovery also tackled the anthrax contamination of The New York Post and ABC News and the sterilization of the Regal Princess, a cruise ship whose passengers were sickened by the Norwalk virus in 2003.
But the meat-and-potatoes of Mr. Gospodarski's business is unheralded deaths, like that of a troubled teenager who shot himself in the basement of his parents' Richmond Hill home in September or the quiet demise of elderly New Yorkers.
In the case of the man in 6-F, his extended period of decay fouled every item in his apartment, requiring that everything, even sections of the floor, be removed and discarded.
"I've had guys left dead for months, where fluid seeped down six floors and everything had to be torn out," Mr. Gospodarski said. "You can't leave one drop of blood or body fluid or the place will stink." In most cases, he said, post-mortem cleanup is quick and simple - wiping down blood-splattered walls, ripping out soiled carpet - but it is a job that would undoubtedly prove burdensome to grieving relatives.
"Most of the time we're simply providing psychological comfort," Mr. Gospodarski said. "People who commit suicide don't think about what they're going to leave behind."
Bio-Recovery's services start at $600 for cases of minimal decomposition and reach into the thousands for more extensive mayhem. The company generally uses industrial-strength cleanser, but its newest service involves superheating an entire apartment, which kills odor-producing microbes and eliminates the need to throw every last painting, book and piece of electronic equipment in the trash. The minimum cost for that procedure is $3,000.
The New York State Crime Victims Board will pay up to $2,500 for cleaning up after a homicide, and many car insurance policies cover the price of restoring the interior of vehicles whose passengers wind up on the wrong end of a gun. Mr. Gospodarski said he never turns anyone away, even if the client cannot pay.
"We never leave anyone hanging," he said without apparent irony. Nearly all of his jobs come from referrals from police officers, prosecutors and paramedics. He does not, he said, call grieving families whose loss he gleans from newspaper accounts.
Bio-Recovery started in Mr. Gospodarski's apartment in 1998. After his years as a paramedic, Mr. Gospodarski said, he was bothered by what he saw on the job.
Ambulance crews would take away a body and leave behind a disturbing pile of latex gloves, syringes and blood-soaked gauze. The detectives who often followed would ring the scene with yellow police tape and spray fingerprint dust around every light switch and door knob.
"I've seen the medical examiner leave behind pieces of brain," he said. "Grieving families shouldn't have to deal with that."
Mr. Gospodarski and his crew are alternately philosophical and vulgar, cracking jokes about the gore in their midst, or about the housekeeping habits of the deceased.
Last week, as they cleaned up the blood of Chantel Curtis, the Staten Island woman who was shot by a boyfriend who then killed himself, Mr. Gospodarski could not help noticing the details of her life: the treadmill in the living room, the vase of roses on the table and the joyful clutter of children's toys. "Why can't these people just kill themselves and leave everyone else alone?" he asked, his eyes pausing on a photograph of the victim and her young son.
It comes as some relief to Bio-Recovery's workers that many cleanups are limited to tiled bathrooms. A fair number of suicides are carried out in bathtubs, and many elderly people, beset by illness, will retreat to a bathroom to die, often on the toilet, the workers said.
Manny Sosa, like many employees, said he had become inured to death. He once retched during a cleanup that required him to handle entrails, but by now he can eat lunch on the job. "Sometimes we play detective and try to figure out what happened," said Mr. Sosa, 26. "I actually look forward to coming to work."
While they may be accustomed to gore, even the hardiest among the crew were unnerved by a recent job that required them to clean out a house in the Bronx that had been used for Santeria, the South American and Caribbean religion that involves the ritual slaughter of animals. The practitioners had defaulted on their mortgage, leaving the bank to deal with whatever mysteries lurked in the dank basement. Mr. Gospodarski's workers, dressed in biohazard suits, sifted through soil and discovered animal hoofs, desiccated snakes, razor blades and bottles of liquid marked with the international symbol for poison. The workers, most of them from Latin America and the West Indies, were clearly scared. At one point, Mr. Sosa unearthed what appeared to be a clump of human hair, and the crew's collective shudder was palpable. "I don't like this one bit," Mr. Sosa said. "I'd rather be dealing with a gunshot victim."
The summer months were unusually slow, and Mr. Gospodarski said he was looking forward to winter, when violence tends to move indoors. Bloodshed is more common in the summer, but there is little money to be made from gunplay that stains the pavement. With winter, however, people end up packed into tiny apartments. Throw boredom, drugs and weapons into the mix, and you have the potential makings for a bio-recovery bonanza.
"When cabin fever sets in, we get a lot of calls," he said. "All you can do is hope for a heavy snowstorm."
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