Picking up after the Grim Reaper

Bio-recovery technicians specialize in Ottawa's death scene cleanups
Roger Collier, The Ottawa Citizen

Saturday, May 02, 2009


People often ask them if they are used to the smell. No, they answer, you never get used to it. Besides, the smell tells you things. It tells you if the deceased was a meat-eater or a vegetarian or an alcoholic. It tells you how long the body had been in the home before it was found and removed. When they start cleaning, though, they put their masks on tight to keep out the smell. It's often apparent that those who visited the scene before them took no such precaution.

"From the piles of vomit on the way in you can tell how bad it's going to be," says Kevin Greenwood, president of One Call Services, the only company in the Ottawa area that specializes in crime, trauma and death scene cleanup.

The company, founded three years ago, has two other full-time employees: Jeremy Greenwood, Kevin's 20-year-old son, and John Wayne O'Brien. All three are bio-recovery technicians, the only ones in Ottawa certified by the American Bio-Recovery Association. Only about 34 Canadians have the certification.

Death scene cleanup makes up between 60 and 70 per cent of their work. The rest includes cleaning up after industrial accidents, ridding old meth labs and grow ops of mould and corrosive chemicals, and decontaminating sites littered with animal or human feces.

About a third of the deaths they clean up after are suicides. Most of the others are from natural causes, but like many of the suicides, they can be messy -- depending on how much a body has decomposed. It is not uncommon for the death of a person who lived alone to go unnoticed for weeks.

"You're never quite as alone as when you die," says Greenwood.

In some cities, bio-recovery companies are called to a lot of crime scenes. But Ottawa is a relatively safe town, so those are rare for One Call Services. On a recent Thursday afternoon, though, a victim support agency called them to clean up after an assault in a boarding house.

One Call Services relies on referrals. Some come from Ottawa police, others from Provincial Removal Service, a company that transfers bodies to funeral homes. The calls can come during dinner, at 4 a.m., on weekends. A three-call week is a busy one.

Marketing their services is the most difficult part of the business. It's not the type of thing you put on a billboard. Most people assume the police clean death scenes, or perhaps paramedics. When they learn that's not the case, family members most often do the cleaning themselves. That's unfortunate, Greenwood says, because they could be exposing themselves to viruses like HIV or Hepatitis C, not to mention profound psychological trauma.

Just before 4 p.m., the guys arrive at the assault scene. The company owns two white vans, both unmarked so they don't draw attention. (Even the company's generic name and motto -- "Help is One Call Away" -- were chosen with discretion in mind.) "There's a reason we don't call ourselves Blood and Guts Cleaners," says Greenwood.

Greenwood climbs the narrow stairs leading to the scene and finds traces of blood in the hallway, in the victim's bedroom and in the boarding house's shared bathroom. The victim had been stabbed in the chest and back the night before, though he is already out of hospital and back home. At the entrance to his tiny, cluttered room, the man tells O'Brien about the attack.

"He wanted to tell me what happened," says O'Brien. "So I let him."

This will be a quick job, a couple of hours at most. The cost, which the victim agency will cover, will be $600. Most jobs are longer and more complicated. They once did an apartment that belonged to a man who died 15 days before being discovered -- in July. The place reeked and was crawling with flies. It took three weeks to finish the job.

Another time a man died while cooking. He was found a week later, the crock pot on his counter boiled dry. Then there was the guy who committed suicide with a shotgun in front of a wood pile. On that job, One Call Services ended up pulling 450 kilograms of waste to an incinerator in Brampton.

Jeremy and O'Brien return to the van for supplies. Minutes later, they come back covered head to toe: disposable protective suits, clear plastic booties, masks and gloves duct-taped at the wrist. They enter the "red zone" (contaminated area) and O'Brien sprays the floor with a chemical that detects blood. Some of the dried flecks on the hardwood turn white, indicating blood, but the large brown spots near the coffee table remain dark. Probably bile.

Greenwood hovers outside the door -- in the "yellow zone" -- and hands supplies to the guys in the room. Jeremy gets on his knees and starts to scrub. O'Brien picks up pill bottles and puts them in a baggie that he places outside the door. Then he starts to sort through garbage, tossing anything contaminated with bodily fluids into a yellow bag, which will be incinerated, and everything else into a blue bag.

Although it isn't glamorous work, the profession has received some attention from Hollywood. In 2007, Samuel L. Jackson starred in Cleaner, a movie about a man tricked into cleaning a murder scene. In Sunshine Cleaning, still in theatres, a single mom starts a crime scene cleanup company with her sister.

Perhaps these movies are one reason why some people have told the guys at One Call Services they have cool jobs. Or maybe these admirers watch too much CSI.

"Our jobs are not cool," says O'Brien. "We pick up human feces."

But their jobs are rewarding, they say. They perform a service that makes bad situations better, if only a little. Back in their Carp office, there's a card from a client who wrote that "it takes very special people to accomplish what needs to be done in times of death."

"It does make you feel good," O'Brien says. "And God forbid they should have to do it themselves."