The Corpse Is Gone; Enter Quietly the Cleaners

By FRANCIS X. CLINES
Published: November 23, 1999

Once cadavers and evidence are removed from a typical crime scene, the police and paramedics drive away, leaving a traumatized family and an opportunity for a delicate enterprise now quietly evident across the land.
''The family just went through this horrific event and now they have to clean up, too?'' Becky Della-Rodolfa said, describing the rationale of her private Philadelphia business that specializes in the cleaning and repairing of the aftermath of homicides, suicides and other mayhem.
More than 200 such companies have been started in urban areas in recent years, according to a Washington lobbying association that is seeking government standards for an industry that practitioners find fraught with public health and professional concerns.
''We need standard ethics and procedural rules for a business that is growing by leaps and bounds,'' said Ron Gospodarski, president of the lobbying group, the American Bio-Recovery Association. The three-year-old association serves an industry that is thriving on the fact that government agencies generally make no provision to clean up the scenes of traumatic deaths.
An exception is Phoenix, where the municipal government has contracted with Dale Cillian, an industry pioneer with 15 years' experience, to clean up after biohazardous crimes and accidents, from homicides to car crashes.
''We should be under the same standards as the funeral industry,'' Mr. Cillian said, warning that fly-by-night operators have been appearing more frequently.
His business, Biopro LLC, has cleaned more than 5,000 crime and accident scenes using high-tech equipment and medical-waste-disposal techniques that the national association wants established as a government requirement.
''I was a paramedic for 18 years,'' Mr. Gospodarski said. He runs a cleanup company in the New York City area that routinely deals with blood-borne and airborne contaminants at scenes of violent deaths or deaths that are not immediately discovered. His workers, wearing protective gear, move in after the police and rip out floorboards and wall panels in tracking the flow of wastes.
''A lot of us got into it from public safety jobs because we got tired of seeing families shocked in the midst of tragedy as they watched cops and medics just strip off their gloves and walk away,'' Mr. Gospodarski said.
He noted the premium on speed in his business, citing one overnight cleanup at a New York restaurant where four people were shot to death. ''An eight-hour job, very messy, blood trails on the walls through the place, and the manager was very, very grateful we could be there within 30 minutes,'' Mr. Gospodarski said of his company, the Bio-Recovery Corporation.
Ms. Della-Rodolfa started her business, Trauma Scene Restoration, when she heard a friend who was a police officer talk of the frustration of leaving shocked families behind after a death. ''I don't think society knows this type of industry exists,'' she said, describing the largely unadvertised manner of the business in which a funeral director, medical examiner or sympathetic ambulance driver might inform a family of a local specialist.
''Restoring the scene and peace of mind'' is the motto of Ms. Della-Rodolfa's small company, as printed in an advertisement in the local yellow pages under House Cleaning. It is embossed as well on packets of golf tees that she distributes at police and medical examiners' conventions. ''They love golf,'' she said.
''We can't call up troubled families -- that would be unethical ambulance chasing,'' Ms. Della-Rodolfa declared as she dealt with a new job. It involved cleaning the home of an elderly recluse who had died alone in a house knee-deep in trash, with 12 cats left unattended for six weeks.
This job will cost $30 an hour and require some messy labor, she estimated. Other jobs at scenes of violence or extended decomposition, with potentially infectious blood and other waste, cost $100 an hour.
She has a staff of three full-time workers with others on call. They use an array of disposable clothing and respirators, and subcontract with a medical-waste company to burn all corpse-related residue.
This precaution is something that Mr. Gospodarski would like to see made a government regulation.
He described a job in the Bronx involving a man whose body was found two weeks after death and who turned out to have had hepatitis and been H.I.V.-positive. Effluvia had seeped into the apartment below, creating a potentially nightmarish situation that local health officials knew nothing about, Mr. Gospodarski said.
Beyond violent deaths, decomposition cases involving people who died alone and neglected make up half of his business, Mr. Gospodarski said.
In Phoenix, Mr. Cillian, who is a firefighter, obtained a general contractor's license to qualify for the dismantling and repairing that can be required at a noisome crime scene. Jobs average about $350, but chaotic crime scenes can cost thousands, he said, noting that he does pro bono work in cases of hardship.
''There's a lot of shootings out here, and the scene at one of them looked like a war zone,'' he said of a recent shootout between a police officer and his killer. ''A hundred rounds were fired; the place was pocked like a movie set.'' When he heard that the police officer's grieving family members wanted to see the scene, Mr. Cillian said, he had all the bullet-torn doors and blood-stained surfaces removed or covered to spare them extra trauma.
Some states, including New York, offer crime victims up to $2,500 for their expenses, and lately trauma cleanup costs have been accepted, Mr. Gospodarski said. But home insurance claims are more open to dispute, as in instances of suicide, Ms. Della-Rodolfa said.
''That can mean the second trauma,'' she said. ''This is when a family must relive the first one all over again by cleaning it up.''